Aquaculture activity in the JRC

Taking into consideration the growing importance of marine aquaculture in the EU, the many challenges linked to its further development and taking into account the Commission's new strategy for aquaculture (2009), in 2011 JRC has launched its initiative to explore its possible involvement in both scientific and policy support aspects of aquaculture.
This will be a long term process, where the first step has been the assessment of the present situation, in terms of the available scientific contributions, the market and production trends and the aim of the several Commission policies – as explicitly established in the vertical, specific legal framework as well as in the strategic papers. The 2011 activity has been fully devoted to the analysis of the necessary elements for the establishment of a sustainable aquaculture, by considering the state-of-the-art technologies, prevention and control systems, methodologies on traceability, data collection, bio-economic modelling and spatial analysis in support of a comprehensive monitoring activity. The final result of the analysis has been the JRC Scientific - Technical Report (EU Policies and Research in Aquaculture – an analytical view by JRC). In 2012 additional technical fields have activities have been put in place according to the analysis performed in the mentioned report. First of all, a study has been conducted on the different points of view of the scientific community in terms of interactions between fisheries and aquaculture, looking at the food market interactions, use of resources, use of fishmeal/fishoil, food security and technical replacement of fishmeal and fish oil in the aquafeed (ref. Natale F., Hofherr J., Fiore G., Virtanen J. "Interactions between aquaculture and fisheries" Mar.Policy(2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2012.05.037). Additional studies have been conducted on the use of spatial analysis applied to some specific aspects of the aquaculture industry: on the one hand, how the spatial analysis can provide indications on the availability of space for aquaculture farming in the context of the integrated marine costal planning, and on the other hand how the spatial analysis can contribute to a better quantification of the labour market in the European aquaculture industry. Finally, a scientific study has been perfomed on the analysis of the profitability of the aquaculture industry in the European Union, where JRC (in collaboration with IFREMER) have analysed by country, segment and main species, financial and accounting data for 2006, 2009 and 2010 of EU aquaculture companies, extracted from the Amadeus database ("Analysis of the profitability of the EU aquaculture sector").

Concerning the technical support to EU Commission Directorate for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, in 2012 JRC has decided to devote resources in the contribution to the development of Guidelines on Aquaculture in the frame of the new Common Fisheries Policies (CFP). The JRC support consists in the design and development of indicators for the sustainability of aquaculture to be taken into consideration by the EU member states while drafting the Multiannual aquaculture strategic plans, as foreseen in the new CFP. The deliverable of the mentioned activity consists in the JRC Scientific and Technical Report on the European Aquaculture Performance Indicators ("An Approach towards European Aquaculture Performance Indicators")