Red tape has UK shellfish aquaculture in a bind

Unfortunately, the UK is nowhere near this level at the moment. Today, it’s about 17,000 tonnes in total, versus, for instance, Spain’s 250,000 tonnes, Jarrad (a former oyster farmer) informed a recent “Get to know Farmed Shellfish” event, hosted by SAGB at London’s Billingsgate Market.

The UK’s cultivated shellfish volume comprises three main products: mussels, oysters and scallops. In volume terms, the country is growing around 14,000 tonnes of mussels, 2,560 tonnes of Pacific oysters, 12 tonnes of native oysters, 0.02 tonnes of queen scallops and 5 tonnes of king scallops annually.

Offering a species-specific comparison, the UK’s oyster production, derived from about 70 sites overall, totals around 26 million bivalves, which pales considerably to France’s 1.2 billion oysters (approximately 120,000 tonnes).

With the UK having similar hydrographical conditions to France and a much larger coastline, the conundrum Jarrad and the SAGB membership wrangle with is, why isn’t it doing more? And pointing out that back in 1861, Billingsgate Market alone sold 496 million oysters, he exclaimed: “It’s extraordinary how it died as an industry.”

On paper, shellfish aquaculture has a lot going for it as an industry. Globally, it’s accepted as the most efficient form of protein production; it delivers ecosystem services – acting as a carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus sink, and cleansing the water. Added to this, it’s environmentally friendly, and is frequently responsible for increasing biodiversity.

“It’s also a highly efficient way of producing high-quality marine protein, that’s fantastic to eat,” said Nicki Holmyard of Offshore Shellfish Ltd, a family-run mussel farming company, based in Lyme Bay on the south coast of England.

But while keeping shellfish alive is incredibly hard work, what’s an even bigger problem for the UK’s producers is that despite being “inherently sustainable” they don’t have a regulatory environment that supports their work and ambitions, she said.

Undone by Brexit

Undoubtedly, one of the biggest challenges to befall UK shellfish farming in recent years was Brexit, said Holmyard. Illustrating the point, she told the SAGB event that until recently, about 10,000 tonnes of mussels were grown in the Menai Straits in north Wales, but that now this industry no longer exists following the rules on water quality that were handed to the UK once it became regarded as a third-country by the European Union.

UK producers are no longer able to export their shellfish to the Union if they come from B-class water, unless they are depurated first. However, in order to depurate very large quantities, producers require large facilities and systems, and nobody in the UK has those at the moment, she said.

Holmyard added that if mussels were to be depurated before being transported to the main market of the Netherlands, where they would be depurated again, then the animals would become very stressed, which would lead to quality issues.

“Also, our partners over there are really not keen on having them depurated in this country. But at the end of the day, we may be forced into that position because we still haven’t sorted out the Brexit issues.”

With regards to the Welsh industry, Jarrad confirmed that 10 years ago, the Menai Straits produced around 10,000 tonnes of dredged mussels, but that plummeted to just 5 tonnes in 2022, which he said was the first year that Brexit bit into the industry.

“That’s the devastating effect that Brexit has had, particularly on the mussel sector,” he said. “The irony is the fact exports were stopped because the Menai Straits are a B-class water [according to the UK’s bacteriological background level testing]. However, there’s been the best part of 50 years of samples from the Menai Straits travelling over to Holland and being tested there, and they’re almost exclusively A-class when they arrive. That’s the difference in the application of regulations and how they’re tested. If the UK tested in the same way as Holland does, the industry wouldn’t have shut down. This an example of where industry is undone by a regulatory issue. It’s not about, in this instance, the quality of the water, it’s about the way they’re tested.”

Jarrad also explained that in the UK, if a shellfish producer was to receive a high reading in a certain month one year, then they would close until a positive test conducted a week later confirms it is okay to reopen. However, they would still have to cease harvesting in the same month of the next year, despite the water quality being unrelated to that of a year previously. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands and other European countries, a bad reading sees operations shut down straight away, with a subsequently good reading then allowing the farmer to open up again, long-term.

“That’s not the way it operates in the UK. It’s very unjust and inappropriate, and we’ve been trying very hard to change this for a number of years, because we’ve always gold-plated what’s now ex-EU regulations, and we’ve done this to the detriment of our own industry. It’s dreadful,” he said.

The situation is “crazy”, agreed Holmyard, who conceded that having Offshore Shellfish’s waters tested every month brings a constant fear that three B-class ratings in a year will see its operations shut down.

“But every single batch that goes to Holland is tested, and we get the results two days later. (In the UK, it takes them a week to get us the results.) And we’ve never failed a test in the Netherlands. They do that test because they supply the major supermarkets all over Europe, and that’s part of their due diligence. They don’t want to poison their customers.”

Unfortunately, UK authorities refuse to use the European results, preferring instead to use a MPN (most probable number) test to ascertain microbial contaminants in the water. According to Jarrad, this method isn’t anywhere near accurate enough for what’s a multi-million-pound industry.

Holmyard added: “We could grow up to 10,000 tonnes, but at the moment we grow about 3,000 tonnes. We can’t expand because investors are not comfortable putting more money in when they don’t know if we can actually sell into Europe. Until we sort that out, the big question we’ll have every month, is what’s going to happen?”

Opportunity missed

The event heard that while farming on land is generally perceived as a positive industry, farming in the sea still tends to have negative connotations in the public eye, with a common misperception bwing that it’s damaging the marine environment. This is despite the fact that many shellfish companies have gone through a lengthy and often costly process of third-party accreditation process to demonstrate their sustainability credentials to buying retailers and caterers. Offshore Shellfish, for example, has both Soil Association and Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) certification.

Further to this, on the oyster farming side, industry is being heavily undermined by the UK government’s policy to class Pacific oysters grown in and around the country as “invasive, non-native species”.

They were in fact introduced by government in the 1960s and weren’t expected to breed. However, because of climate change and global warming, these shellfish are now breeding in UK waters.

“Some would say that’s a good thing, but the statutory nature conservation bodies’ [SNCBs] current advice is destroying the industry – that is that there can be no new farms and no expansion to existing farms. Well, that’s crazy. We’re losing a great opportunity; our neighbouring countries in the EU accept the species as an ‘ordinary resident or naturalised’, and they accept it as fully compatible within the environmental legislation,” Jarrad said.

“That is the same legislation we’re working under, but we take a different attitude due to the current restrictive and negative government policy. The Duchy of Cornwall, in its wisdom, for example, has decided not to renew any licenses on any of its estuaries. And our concern is other landowners will follow suit. The first farm closes this year and that’s really sad.”

Meanwhile, modelling conducted by the UK’s government’s Centre of Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) has suggested that by 2050 Pacific oysters will have spread as far north as the Faroe Islands, meaning that while more and more Pacifics will grow wild in UK waters, the commercial harvesting of these products will be banned.

“It’s madness,” Jarrad said. “Why is our government sacrificing our own industry, particularly when it’s producing such an environmentally beneficial, nutritious product? The sector delivers wealth generation along the coast and creates jobs. It supports infrastructure in rural communities, quite often deprived ones.

“Oysters are also the ultimate and sustainable food, requiring no chemicals, no feed, no medicines. And oyster farming is restorative agriculture in its truest form – it can deliver on the nation’s food security needs. What’s not to love?”