In just a few days savvy investors will be able to put their money where there mouths are by investing in the world’s first investment fund devoted strictly to fish.
Amundi Japan (which manages a $35 billion fund) is hoping to raise at least $500 million in investment dollars on the back of a booming global appetite for fish. Its pitch is straightforward: As demand for fish grows, the richer those who engage in the industry of fishing become. That includes fishing boat and engine makers, processing plants, chains of seafood and sushi restaurants and, especially, aquaculture or fish farms.
Twinned with the fact that the most-populous countries on the planet – China, India and Brazil – are still growing and growing slightly wealthier, thus more desirous of healthy eating, and it’s looking bad for the planet’s dwindling fish stocks.
That’s not to say there’s not money to be made off fish and all if its ancillary businesses; Amundi’s managers are predicting investors will double their money within six years, as demand continues to grow.
Researchers at Amundi, a merger formed by French-based Credit Agricole and Societe-Generale’s asset management businesses, suggest global seafood consumption will grow from 110 million tons today to more than 132 million tons by 2030. Its public mutual fund will be available for investment beginning August 9 and begin operating on August 20.
The downside, of course, is that as demand for fish goes up the supply goes down. Contrary to some popular opinion, fish are not an infinite resource. Such cynics (realists?) as the World Wildlife Fund predict that at the current rate of taking the world’s bluefin tuna stocks, for example, could expire by 2012 and that all the fish we currently know will be gone by 2050, replaced by fish we currently refuse to take because they are hard to catch or have no taste or jellyfish, the cockroach of the sea.
Critics compare the investment opportunity to offering a rainforest depletion fund or a real estate development project in the middle of a panda refuge.
The so-called “themed investment” fund is the product of investment bankers watching the headlines. “There’s a reasonably good correlation between per capital GDP growth and consumption of fish in emerging markets, which are growing fast with huge populations, so we thought this could be an interesting investment story,” Amundi’s chief investment officer Masato Degawa told the WSJ.
Statistics bear him out: According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, global fish consumption per person has increased to more than 35 pounds a year in 2007 from 23 pounds in 1980. During the same period total production of fish around the globe increased from 72 million to 140 million tons. In China, for example, the average consumption of fish per person increased by nearly five pounds to 58 pounds per person between 2001 and 2007.
The world’s leaders in per-capita-fish-consumption are all in Asia: Despite its rapacious seafood appetite, Japan ranks fourth in the world, with each Japanese eating more than his/her bodyweight in fish, about 155 pounds a year.
The planet’s highest rate is in the Maldives, where each person eats 336 pounds a year! But don’t let those numbers confuse: Japan is still the world’s leader in fish eating. It’s 127 million people eat more than 20 billion pounds of seafood each year, while in the Maldives, its 1,200 islands boasting just 335,000 people, takes just 112 million pounds.
What about the bluefin tuna, which everyone but the Japanese seems to think, is endangered. Tuna fishers and processors are viable investments according to Amundi. “We are not the police,” said Degawa
Some of the news reports of the unique fund as reported in business journals around the globe caution that there may be one potential “sticking point” to the investment: Overfishing.
Hopefully the fund’s salesmen will caution potential investors that if there are no more fish in the sea there won’t be much need for fishing boats, fishing rods or even seafood markets. To that end, Amundi predicts that the bulk of its fish fund investments will be in fish farming, a booming industry, since levels of caught fish have evened off since 1990.
What a difference a vote makes.
In a tally by the U.N. World Heritage committee meeting in Brasilia last week the Galapagos Islands were taken off the list of World Heritage sites formally considered “in danger.”
Tourists march on in the Galapagos. Photo by Fiona Stewart
The 19-island chain off the coast of Ecuador was added to the list in 2007, thanks to rapid increases in overfishing, most egregiously sea cucumber poaching and shark finning. While the islands are well protected from the heavy impact of tourist’s feet – 97 percent of the islands are off limits to the tourist industry, which has boomed in recent years – the seas that surround them had been less well protected.
The problem stemmed from horrific poverty on the mainland; tens of thousands of impoverished Ecuadoreans dreamed of moving to the islands to cash in on the tourism boom. About 30,000 did. When they arrived and found no pot of gold at the end of the tourist rainbow, many turned to illegal fishing.
After the president of Ecuador announced the island state at “great risk,” the Galapagos were added to the endangered list. After just two years, a vote of 14-5 took it off. Brazil, at the request of Ecuador, had asked that the Galapagos be taken off the list. Apparently the bad publicity of being ranked “endangered” (thus mismanaged) outweighed the need to use the listing to keep world attention focused on the problems.
(For the rest of my dispatch, go to takepart.com)
I built a fence in my backyard this summer, which seemed to require more zoning and inspection, applications and approvals than much of what we see built along the coastlines of the U.S.
It’s a fact that while zoning laws have been pretty tightly regulated on land, for more than a couple hundred years we’ve had a far more lax approach to that can do what on the ocean.
As a result, ocean-lovers are crediting the Obama Administration with some foresight for recognizing soon after it took power eighteen months ago that the country needed some kind of overarching national ocean policy, not so different in scope from the Clean Water and Clean Air acts which have been law for nearly four decades.
The mess in the Gulf has highlighted why the country needs some kind of comprehensive approach to managing and protecting the ocean and coasts. Half of the country lives along its edges; millions of jobs are created there, contributing hundreds of billions to the GDP. But the fragmented way we’ve managed the ocean and coast in the past has had a spotlight shown on it daily since the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank more than 100 days ago.
The coast of Louisiana may be the poster-child for why we need better ocean/coastal management: A Dead Zone the size of New Jersey grows each summer thanks to fertilizers washed down the Mississippi from 31 northern states. Its coastline is eroding at the rate of a football field every 30 minutes thanks to nearly one hundred years of shortsighted management. Various industrial pollutions credited to the big oil, gas and petrochemical operations that have operated there with a kind of free will for decades have caused obvious problems. On top of all that, there is a sizable fishing culture that has often been encouraged or allowed to overfish. Add in the coming trends of ocean farming all operated within spitting distance of the country’s third largest port and you realize how big a stew is brewing in just this one region.
(For the rest of my dispatch, go to takepart.com.)
It’s easy to hammer the Japanese about their rapacious attitude towards seafood in general and bluefin tuna. specifically. Though a relatively small country (127 million) the island nation consumes about 30 percent of the world’s seafood take; Japanese processing boats scour the globe non-stop buying up any and all of the much-prized tuna.
Now comes word from Greenpeace that with a little nudging there may be a slight shift in attitude among Tokyo’s man-on-the-street regarding the future of fish.
Timed during Japan’s celebration of “Marine Season” (with one day devoted to honoring the sea and praying for its fishermen), the local Greenpeace branch has published a “red list” suggesting 15 species of fish that should be taken out of the stores and off the table in Japan, including five species of tuna.
According to Greenpeace, “Japan consumes 25 percent of the world’s tuna, including more than three-quarters of the remaining critically endangered bluefin tuna.”
“The ongoing destructive fishing for Pacific bluefin tuna, which begins this month, is only one example of how fishing industries and governments are failing our oceans,” says Wakao Hanaoka, Greenpeace’s Japan spokesperson.
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