Institute of Aquaculture

Based at the University of Stirling, the Institute conducts research on fish farming amongst other things.

Spinning the industry?

According to Spinning Farmed Salmon:

Back on the other side of the Atlantic, on 16 January 2004 the Scotsman ran the headline: ‘Claims of unsafe fish run contrary to the facts, say scientists’. The authors of the article, Gordon Bell and Douglas Tocher from the University of Stirling’s Institute of Aquaculture, stated that ‘the research study claiming links between consuming farmed salmon and risks to health through dioxins and related chemicals are, in our opinion, grossly unfair and misrepresentative of a product which is both nutritious and healthy’. This was because ‘In 2002, we at the Institute of Aquaculture at the University of Stirling undertook a wholly independent study to measure dioxins and PCBs in Scottish farmed salmon’.

That statement is interesting for three reasons. First like industry and government bodies, it misrepresented the study in Science by alleging it was about ‘risks to health through dioxins’. It was not. Second, it implied that the Stirling study had been intended explicitly to study levels of dioxins (and dioxin like PCBs) – which it had not. Third, the claim that the Stirling study was ‘wholly independent’ merits scrutiny.

To take the latter claim first, the funding for the Stirling study came from a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)-LINK Aquaculture initiative. NERC is a public research funding body, but ‘Link’ schemes mean that 50 per cent of the funding comes straight from industry. In this case from BioMar Ltd., EWOS Innovation, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Marine Harvest (Scotland) Ltd., Skretting, The Highland Council and Uniq Prepared Foods (Annan) Ltd.

Marine Harvest and Skretting are subsidiary companies of Nutreco, a global food and animal nutrition company (in 2006 they were swallowed up by Panfish). Nutreco are major players in the farmed salmon industry, as they point out on their website: ‘A major proportion of salmon and poultry products are put on the market through the company’s own marketing and distribution channels under the company’s own labels’. Skretting is a salmon feed company operating in Norway, Chile, the UK and Ireland. Marine Harvest, as previously mentioned, was the world’s largest aquaculture company as well as producer and provider of farmed salmon. EWOS is primarily an aquaculture feeds company as are Uniq Prepared Food and BioMar.

The study is therefore not independent in the sense that it is part funded by industry. But what is it that the industry were interested in? It transpires that the research was part of a range of studies being carried out at Stirling on the substitution of natural fish oil based foods by alternatives such as vegetable oils and other sources. The reason for this is the dramatic increase in fish farming is putting pressure on natural feedstuffs - making the industry unsustainable, in other words.

It transpires that the study undertaken in 2002 was not, as Bell and Tocher wrote in their article, ‘to measure dioxins and PCBs in Scottish farmed salmon’ but initially sought to look at the effects on farmed salmon of using vegetable oil feeds. The end result was entitled ‘Dioxin and dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in Scottish farmed salmon: effects of replacement of dietary marine fish oil with vegetable oils’ and the report’s content is mainly concerned with dioxin levels.

So, although their research was presented as independent, as investigating organic contaminants and as examining the same contaminants as in the paper in Science, in reality the study was partially corporate funded, was conducted to evaluate the potential use of vegetable oil as fish feed and was focused on a different class of chemicals that the original study. These scientists at best face a serious conflict of interest, and at worst might appear to be acting as spin doctors for the industry which part-funds their work.