Scotland Aquaculture Footprint
August 18th, 2008 by AndrewScotland is the second largest producer of farmed Atlantic Salmon in Europe. It has over 450 registered active finfish sites according to a July 2008 census of the Scottish Aquaculture industry. A map showing the distribution of the registered farms may be viewed here.
Tags: salmon, scotland
Posted in Economics. Permalink for this post: permalink.
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September 8th, 2008 at 11:39 am
This map highlights for me the difficulties of distance that aquaculture has to overcome to reach its market. By definition, it has to be located on the coastal periphery, away from sources of pollution = cities = markets.
Currently in Scotland, as I suspect in most places, fish is frozen and trucked in chilled containers. There is no infrastructure in remote Scotland to support large volume trucking operations - the narrow, steep roads simply aren’t suitable. The chiller containers are expensive. And of course, from Shetland the containers have to be loaded onto the overnight ferry to Aberdeen first up! The whole exercise seems unsustainable.
A recent EU funded project called Northern Maritime Corridoor may have an answer to these problems. They aimed to develop and promote sea freight as: “A means of efficient, safe and sustainable transportation, connecting coastal areas and enhancing regional development…”. More information on this project is available at http://www.northernmaritimecorridor.no.
I think sea freight is an ideal solution for the North Sea aquaculture industry because it makes a virtue of their coastal location. Would this solution have any relevance for the WA aquaculture industry or globally?