Monday, 5th October 2009
October Brussels Briefing
1. BEWARE OF THE PANGA FISH
Scottish fishermen fight a daily battle for their livelihood. In addition to all the European red-tape and fishing quotas our fishermen have to endure, there’s a new threat looming.
A new, tasty superfish called Panga has taken Europe by storm and will soon be stocked in Scottish supermarkets. However, consumers should beware, there are serious concerns over the purity of the water used for processing and the way in which some producers are rearing these fish.
Spain and France have so far led the way in European Panga sales. In fact they have undermined the sale of other fish that Spanish and French fishermen catch. They complain that their hard-won catches are mouldering on the quaysides, while shoppers fill their trolleys with frozen Panga fillets, resulting in a grave decline in sales of the local catch.
Panga is a fairly bland, white-fleshed fish, with bone-free meaty fillets. Some people say the fish tastes vaguely like cod and is a cheaper alternative at around £2 per 1lb.
With the imminent arrival of these packets of Panga fillets onto our Scottish supermarket shelves, it won’t be long before we see a similar crisis hitting our very own fishermen, with a price slump affecting fresh caught cod and haddock and even farmed salmon and trout, as shoppers turn to Panga & chips for their evening meal.
Some fish and chip shops in England have even been fined for fraudulently selling Panga as cod.
But before anyone rushes to search out this frozen titbit, in addition to failing to support our local fishermen, there are several facts that they should know about Panga.
Panga, also called Pangasius or Vietnamese River Cobbler, White Catfish, Basa Fish and Gray Sole, are mostly being bred in huge industrial fish farms in the Mekong River of Vietnam, one of the most heavily polluted rivers on earth.
Food safety scientists in Spain conducted tests recently which found that 8 out of 10 samples of the fish tested were seriously polluted with dangerous toxins.
Vietnamese factories, positioned along the Mekong River, dump thousands of tonnes of contaminants into its slow-flowing waters on a daily basis. The water in which the Panga is farmed is polluted with bacteria and other industrial effluents like arsenic and heavy metals.
The hygiene and sanitary conditions of the processing plants aren't much better with many falling well below current standards. They use water from the Mekong River to wash and freeze the fish before exporting them to supermarkets across Europe.
Worse still, some reports insist that the Vietnamese fish farmers are injecting the female Panga with a specially developed hormone, purchased in China and made from the dehydrated urine of pregnant women. This concoction seems to encourage the female Panga to lay more eggs, more quickly. In some cases they can lay up to 500,000 eggs at one time. The resulting young fish, after hatching, have a greater growth rate and are ready to market weeks prior to naturally born fish. This helps to drive down the price of Panga.
Vietnam exported 640,000 tonnes of Panga in 2008, almost 10 percent of it coming to Europe.
While I understand that during the recession many of us look for cheaper alternatives in the supermarkets, consumers must read labels carefully and wherever possible, ensure the fish come from a sustainable and clean source, like Puerto Rico.
‘Panga’ means to pick a quarrel or squabble in Indian. So, avoid a quarrel, play safe and stick to good old fresh-caught Scottish fish or farmed salmon and trout from Scotland’s high quality fish farms. You will never go wrong if you support the Scottish fishing industry.
2. SOWING THE SEEDS FOR A BETTER FUTURE
The news that some of the big supermarkets have been in talks with the Government about introducing Genetically Modified (GM) ingredients to the nation’s shelves will be welcome to Scottish farmers. In fact, GMs have been on the shelves of our food shops for years, in various different shapes and forms, although most supermarkets have tried to keep this quiet for fear of disturbing the 'Frankenstein Food' scare-monger lobby!
The more open approach to GMs will also be welcomed by developing countries, where biotech (BT) crops have been cited as a solution to their hunger problems.
Six million people are born every month across the world. By 2030 the world population will have expanded to such an extent that we will require a 50 percent increase in food production to meet anticipated demand. By 2080 global food production would need to double.
However, with deserts spreading and an area the size of Ukraine being take out of agricultural food production every year due to drought and as a direct consequence of climate change, global food production is declining rather than expanding. We are gradually being trapped by a deadly pincer movement.
There is an urgent need to agree an agricultural system that can ensure a sustainable future. But in doing this, we must take into consideration the fact that we will have to produce more food on less land, whilst minimising the environmental impact and carbon footprint of agriculture.
There is always an element of risk involved at the frontier of scientific research and the speed of change today challenges our limits of trust and confidence. Many concerns have been raised about the safety of genetically modified crops on the one hand, while on the other hand government regulators in many countries have authorised their large scale use as being completely safe, following rigorous scientific assessment.
The fact remains that GM crops are and will be a part of modern agriculture on a global scale. They've been around for twelve years without any harmful effects whatsoever. Of course it will never be possible to guarantee zero risk and that's why we must place emphasis on rigorous scientific assessment of these new crops and apply that to the regulation of these products in order to minimise the potential risks and maximise the potential benefits.
The first GM crops were introduced in North America in 1995 and in 2008, more than 125 million hectares of GM crops were being commercially grown worldwide.
Genetically modified food was first sold in the UK in 1996 but hysteria came a few months later, in the wake of some very public cases of CJD. Fuelled by tabloid hysteria, the British people become wary of Government regulators and campaigned against the release of herbicide-resistant soya-beans. As far as some people were concerned, a monster had been born.
While critics call into question the possible unknown dangers that might develop from GM consumption in the longer term arguing that GM foods can be incorporated into a consumer’s own genetic make-up and raising fears over the potential allergies relating to GMOs, its defenders argue that agricultural biotechnology can improve food quality, delayed ripening for transportability and improve freshness.
Additional issues have been raised in terms of the unknown environmental impact, for example the effects of insect resistant GM crops designed to kill insects, are unknown; the fear that GMs might hinder the establishment of a sustainable agricultural system for all farmers; its impact on biodiversity, potentially causing a direct drop in species diversity; and that GMs could bind developing nation farmers to western commercial interests.
But there are two sides to every argument. Those in favour of GM crops, dismiss the negative claims suggesting that insect and disease resistant crops reduce the number of pesticide applications as a whole with only one herbicide treatment needed. Once tried, farmers (whether in East India, East Africa or Eastern Scotland) will only continue to use a new technology if it works. However, after 12 years of large commercial use, no negative effects of GMOs have been substantiated.
Biotechnology is by no means a silver bullet but rather a tool that can assist poorer countries to improve food production. Against a background of a rapidly expanding world population and declining area of land available for agricultural use, the world's farmers need every tool in the toolkit to enable them to feed the hungry.
