Byline: Vikram Doctor
Nov. 5--MUMBAI, India -- In this year's budget, the finance minister made an odd little change. He reduced duty on import of Atlantic salmon from 30 percent to 10 percent. Since consumption of Atlantic salmon is hardly widespread in India, the change went largely unnoticed.
But not by Norway, which is the world's largest exporter of salmon. The Norwegians have started heavily promoting their salmon to top hotels and restaurants, and this was an important part of the visit of the Crown Prince and Princess of Norway to India earlier this week.
The highlight was a Norwegian Salmon Challenge sponsored by the Norwegian Seafood Export Council (NSEC) for student chefs from around the country, which took place at the Institute of Hotel Management (IHM), Mumbai.
Each student was given a full salmon from Norway to come up with a dish that balanced presentation, Indian flavours and good technique into a delicious whole. To wild cheers from his batchmates, the first prize was won by IHM's Rahul Tusshar who received his prize from Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway for a dish of tandoori salmon with makhani gravy.
A dish like that conjures visions of salmon served in dhabhas down Indian highways and while speaking to ET, the optimism of Terje E Martinussen, managing director, NSEC, falls only slightly short of that. 'We see really good potential for Norwegian salmon in India,' he says.
As of now, their efforts have been geared towards the more upscale hotels and restaurants where the response has been very positive. The distinctive, yet adaptable flavour of salmon and its meaty texture has made it a favourite with chefs, and the Norwegians can supply it at the consistent quality essential in the hospitality business.
Retail sales are not yet on the cards for Norwegian salmon, but Mr Martinussen says that this will follow as large scale retail formats like Makro and Tesco start setting up shop in India. In the long run, he feels, the combination offered by Norwegian salmon of being a premium product which combines health benefits.
'The growing awareness of health issues in India is also good for salmon because it is full of omega-3 oils that contain antioxidants that are very good for the body,' says Mr Martinussen.
But bring up some other health concerns and Martinussen's smile becomes a bit more fixed. Rather unaddressed in all the salmon-selling are the many concerns that have been raised about Norwegian salmon.
About a year ago, Russian authorities banned imports of Norwegian salmon for containing what they claimed were dangerously high levels of lead and cadmium. Norway's seafood industry has been criticised by environmental groups, fisheries experts and even the country's own organisations like the Norwegian State Pollution Control Board for dubious production norms.
The problem is fish farming. Norway was one of the pioneers in this controversial new area, starting as far back as '60, to harvest eggs from wild salmon and breed them in huge cages, as much as 60 metres long and 12 metres deep, strung out along the coast.
The many fjords, deep sea inlets, along the Norwegian coast proved ideal for this and by now, nearly all exports of Norwegian salmon are of farmed fish. The NSEC insists this has little impact on the flavour. 'Remember these were originally bred from wild salmon, so it's the same fish, raised in the sea,' insists Mr Martinussen.
The leading Indian chefs who have come to IHM to judge the competition are less sure. 'There's definitely a difference in taste between wild and farmed,' says one corporate chef. 'But you have to balance it with cost. Wild salmon is just too expensive to serve.'
This has been the key selling point for Norwegian salmon. In the past, salmon has always had a luxury status. Its special texture and flavour were supposed to derive from its arduous life history, with the fish being spawned in freshwater streams, then finding its way to the ocean, where it would feed on the krill that gave its distinctive pink colour, before returning to freshwater, often the very stream it was born in, to spawn again.
Farming was a way to bring down the costs, making an aspirational product accessible, and at a time when fish sales were on the rise. It was even thought environmentally sound since it would prevent the depletion of wild salmon.
Norway added to this by developing a brand, Norge, complete with a picture of a burly fisherman and snow-capped mountains over the sea in the background. So successful has this been that the NSEC claims that in some markets like Germany, the Norge brand is as well known as Coca-Cola.
And if concerns were raised about farming went directly against the long river-ocean journeys that were essential to the salmon, the farmers weren't above manipulating the product. For example, farmed fish, fed on fish meal, tends to have a greyish colour, rather than real salmon-pink of wild salmon, so they simply started adding colouring to the fish meal.
But all this has started backfiring. The colouring initially used was banned by some countries for food directly consumed by humans. The fish meal that salmons eat comes from smaller fish caught by trawlers which were accused of depleting the oceans by their undiscriminating catches.
These smaller fishes were caught in the polluted North Sea and when eaten by the salmon, the fat soluble toxins were concentrated and stored in their oily tissues. Farmed salmon were prone to infestation by a parasite called sea-lice, which they passed on to wild fish when cages broke and fish escaped, a not infrequent occurrence.
By-products of the industry like waste food and salmon faeces polluted the coastline. Finally animal rights activists have raised concerns about the stress that confinement and crowding in cages would cause on a fish used to roaming the open seas.
Peter Singer, a philosopher and expert on ethics, and Jim Marson, an environmentalist, in Eating, their recent book on the ethics of consumption, quote a fisheries expert who points out that through most of their life, wild salmon might never meet another of their species, until they came home to spawn.
In the cages they are confined thousands together with no real space to roam. Environmental Defense, one of the oldest global environmental organisations, runs a website, oceanslive.org, which recommends which fish to eat or avoid from an environmental point of view, and Atlantic salmon, it says bluntly, is, 'a worst choice for the environment.' If you must eat it, they advise, take less than half a portion a month, and young children should avoid it entirely.
Norway has not been inactive in meeting these criticisms, and the rapidity with which Martinussen responds when they are raised suggests much practice. The quality of the fish meal has been improved, he says, and no longer uses environmentally damaging products.
Alternatives have been found to the chemicals and antibiotics that the fish were earlier dosed with -- sea lice, for example, are being tackled by introducing small fish (cleaner wrasse) that eat them into the cages. 'They groom the salmon,' he says almost poetically.
Fish escapes still occur, he admits, but the industry has done much to reduce them. Taking the argument to a larger level, he points out how fish farming is an environmentally more efficient way to create food. 'If you want to grow soya beans you have to cultivate land, whereas fish farming uses a resource that was not being used before,' he says.
These are valid points, especially when taken in the context of Indian fisheries. Seafood in India is not farmed, but overfishing is rampant, trawler practices are almost certainly environmentally damaging, and fish caught along the coast near cities like Mumbai have been found to have high levels of toxins.
None of these issues seems to bother the Indian fisheries industry, in comparison to Norwegian fish farmers, who are clearly aware of the problems and trying to solve at least some of them.
But the point is that such information should be known to consumers for them to make an informed choice. Are you comfortable eating expensive and carefully produced farmed fish, even if it's environmentally dubious? Or would you prefer naturally caught, but possibly overfished and unhealthy local fish?
Consumers need to ask these questions, but it would help if the hotels and restaurants which provide these foods were proactive in helping the debate. Rather than blindly accepting food products promoted from abroad, especially on grounds of health, the young student chefs in the Norwegian Salmon Challenge might have been better served by learning how to ask questions about where the fish they were cutting and cooking had really come from.
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