MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Prospects for Falklands mussel industry examined.
As reported in last week's Penguin News, Edinburgh-based natural resource economists, Nautilus Consultants were commissioned by the Falkland Islands Corporation (FIDC) to study the viability of establishing a Falkland Islands mussel export industry.
According to Nautilus's own web site, www.nautilus-consultants.co.ukthe company, which was formed in 1979 "has consistently provided practical strategic advice to natural resource users, managers and planners. The company has been a long-term proponent of sustainable development (long before this term entered into common usage), taking an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to development problems."
In the case of the Falkland islands, the study was commissioned by FIDC on behalf of the Mussel Development Group, a small association of local businessmen and others, who recently also traveled several thousand miles to view commercial mussel farming operations in Scotland and elsewhere. Among this group is locally-born fish-farmer, Simon Hardcastle, who with his company Falklands Fresh has been producing mussels in the Falklands for some years.
Mercopress caught up with Crick Carleton, Chief Executive and founder of Nautilus Consultants and his colleague, John Holmyard, on the eve of their departure from the Islands and found them in reasonably buoyant mood with regard to what they had found during their visit. Mr. Holmyard, who farms mussels himself at Loch Etive in Scotland said that on his tour of the East Falklands which had involved some thousand miles of driving ? no mean feat, when much of it had been off-road ? many potential areas for large scale mussel farming had been observed.
Asked why the expertise of Nautilus was required when mussel farming was already taking place in the Islands, Mr.Holmyard said that the purpose of the study being undertaken by Nautilus was to provide an integrated appraisal of the creation of a mussel export industry, which would encompass not only site and technology selection issues, and the practicalities of harvesting and collection of raw material, but also a host of related issues including quality assessment, industry codes of practice, and the techno-economics associated with processing, production and shipping.
Mr. Carleton acknowledged that Simon Hardcastle's work had been "ground-breaking" and that the existence of a small scale local mussel fishery meant that some years worth of relevant local knowledge had been gained in the Falklands. However, to put into perspective the scale of operations which might be envisaged in the Falklands, Mr. Carleton said that the Falklands Fresh operation currently harvests between 30 to fifty tonnes of mussels a year, mainly for local consumption. That kind of operation could be made to produce several hundred tonnes annually, but Nautilus had been asked by The Falkland Islands Development Board to look at the feasibility of developing an industry, which would expect to produce several thousand tonnes annually.
Large scale operations would be necessary not only to overcome cost disadvantages, arising from the Falklands location, but also to produce sufficiently large quantities of product to allow it to impact upon wholesalers as a separate and identifiable brand. The expected market was Europe where established supplier countries like France, Spain and Holland were finding themselves unable to keep up with demand for blue mussels such as those grown in the Falklands.
The duration of the voyage to market would not be a factor in the transportation of frozen mussels, Mr. Carleton said, but this would have to be done on a large enough scale to produce economies. He envisaged transportation of the mussels in twenty to forty tonne containers, which suggested that the establishment of a container freight service with links to Europe would be an essential part of the required infrastructure.
John Holmyard cited Scotland, Ireland and New Zealand as examples of countries which had started some twenty years ago and succeeded in establishing large scale mussel farming operations where none had existed before. New Zealand had been particularly successful and was now producing annually some 80,000 tonnes of mussels, though he was quick to point out that the New Zealand mussel was of a different, larger and faster growing species.
Estimating that the capital required to establish farms in the Falklands and provide the necessary infrastructure would probably be "several million for starters" Crick Carleton added that due to the three year growing period of the mussels, it would be five years before any income would flow from this investment, adding that mussel farming was not a "get rich quick business" though demand world-wide was continuing to grow. The Nautilus team are now returning to Scotland to prepare a report for the FIDC and the Mussel Development Group. "We now go away with a much stronger picture to look at the costs and the marketing side of things and how you would form the corporate structure." said Crick Carleton, adding. "Until the numbers are done we may have to back-pedal a bit, but everything we've seen here, we feel optimistic about. It could work."
Questioned about any negative impacts which mussel farming might have on the natural environment of the Falklands and possible knock-on effects which might harm the tourism industry, John Holmyard stated that as mussel farming did not involve feeding the creatures, but simply "providing a surface for them to settle on and grow" all that was being introduced into the natural environment, other than the mussels themselves, was rope. He added that in Scotland where there had been considerable environmental disturbance attributed to salmon ranching, mussel farmers were not even required to produce an environmental impact survey and visits to mussel farms had become an established and popular feature of some tourist trails.
John Fowler (MP) Stanley
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