• Energy Research

Despite the efforts to make fish sustainable, it is largely unknown if young educated consumers’ taste of fish and their willingness to pay more for fish is influenced by positively framed messages regarding sustainable farming practices. This research investigated if a positively framed description of sustainable farming opposed to positively framed descriptions of flavour, health benefits, or socially responsible farming, influences young consumers’ liking, and willingness to pay for farmed salmon. Young consumers of fish (n = 119) randomly tasted Fresh and hot Smoked salmon and rated their liking and willingness to pay more on structured line scales. The salmon were labelled with either a description of sustainable farming practices, flavour benefits, nutrition/health benefits, socially responsible farming practices, or no descriptions. Descriptive labelling about Sustainability (p = 0.04), Flavour (p = 0.01), and Health/nutrition (p = 0.01) significantly increased consumers’ liking of Fresh salmon compared to Fresh salmon without labelling. No such a difference was found between the social responsibility label and the sample without labels (p = 0.2). Participants were willing to pay more for 250 g of Fresh and Smoked Salmon with descriptive labels (Fresh: $9.3 ± $0.003; Smoked: $10.1 ± $0.003), than for the same Salmon without such labels (Fresh: $9.0 ± $0.06; Smoked: $9.8 ± $0.08) (p < 0.001). The sustainability descriptive label had no added benefit above other descriptive labels. The liking and buying intent were, for all labels and fish types, strongly correlated (r = 0.80, p < 0.001). In conclusion, sustainability labelling is promising, but does not differentiate from other positively framed messages.

Hunger and malnutrition remain among the most devastating problems facing the world's poor and needy, and continue to dominate the health and well-being of the world's poorest nations. Moreover, there are growing doubts as to the long-term sustainability of many existing food production systems, including capture fisheries and aquaculture, to meet the future increasing global demands. Of the different agricultural food production systems, aquaculture (the farming of aquatic animals and plants) is widely viewed as an important weapon in the global fight against malnutrition and poverty, particularly within developing countries where over 93% of global production is currently produced, providing in most instances an affordable and a much needed source of high quality animal protein, lipids, and other essential nutrients. The current article compares for the first time the development and growth of the aquaculture sector and capture fisheries by analyzing production by mean trophic level. Whereas marine capture fisheries have been feeding the world on high trophic level carnivorous fish species since mankind has been fishing the oceans, aquaculture production within developing countries has focused, by and large, on the production of lower trophic level species. However, like capture fisheries, aquaculture focus within economically developed countries has been essentially on the culture of high value-, high trophic level-carnivorous species. The long term sustainability of these production systems is questionable unless the industry can reduce its dependence upon capture fisheries for sourcing raw materials for feed formulation and seed inputs. In line with above, the article calls for the urgent need for all countries to adopt and adhere to the principles and guidelines for responsible aquaculture of the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. 105 94 12 2,163 Q1