The UiS team keeps a close eye on developments in its sector, report professors Frank Asche and Ragnar Tveterås at the department for industrial economics, risk management and planning.
- The importance of pursuing research on a global basis is that we secure access to knowledge which we wouldn’t otherwise have possessed, explains Prof Asche.
He and Prof Tveterås are the prime movers in the seafood research effort at the UiS. They have set very ambitious targets for this work.
- We want the UiS to be the world’s leading specialist in economic analysis of seafood markets and the marketing of such produce,” Prof Asche affirms.
The UiS is the only Norwegian institution to offer seafood management and marketing as a specialisation within an MSc on economic-administrative subjects.
International
Aquaculture is an international industry and Norway ranks as an important player, producing almost 600 000 tonnes of farmed salmon annually. More than 95 per cent of its output is exported as either roundfish or fillets.
- In light of these figures, our research efforts must clearly be pursued in cooperation with other international institutes, observes Prof Tveterås.
The importance of such cross-national collaboration means that the UiS seafood researchers devote much time to foreign trips, international conferences and building networks.
They also make their own contribution by reviewing papers for and acting as editors of international journals. A high level of activity is maintained both in research and publication.
- We’re probably the group in Norway with the highest proportion of published papers per capita where seafood is concerned, says Prof Asche.
Dependence
He and his colleagues emphasise their dependence on international networks to strengthen their own expertise. They are currently in touch with academics in the USA, the UK, Australia, Chile, Canada, France, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland.
- We’re constantly meeting research colleagues from other countries at conferences and seminars. They’re important meeting places, explains Prof Tveterås.
- At the same time, we invite foreign academics to attend such programmes here at the UiS and to serve as our guest speakers.
He highlights marketing know-how as an area where the Stavanger researchers have benefited greatly from their international contacts.
- A lot of the research in this field is generic. In other words, the industry joins forces to promote the good qualities of salmon in general, rather than each supplier and its brand.
- USD 1 billion is devoted to such marketing every year in the USA, for instance. But the aquaculture sector still needs to learn more about this type of sales promotion, and we at the UiS were accordingly commissioned to do a study on it.
The Stavanger researchers accomplished this by involving specialists from the universities of Rhode Island and Alabama in the USA and the University of Stirling in the UK.
That allowed them to benefit from the knowledge possessed by American and British researchers about marketing and the markets in their own countries.
Attitudes
The UiS team has other examples of projects where they have drawn on foreign colleagues, including an EU-funded project about European attitudes to organic food and organic farmed fish.
- We worked together with researchers from Denmark, the UK, Franc and Spain to establish discussion groups in each country, explains Prof Tveterås.
- This project demanded so much knowledge of languages and cultures that it would have been difficult to execute without our existing network collaboration.
Another topic in focus at the UiS is the way income from seafood is divided along the value chain – in other words, how much goes to fishermen, intermediaries and supermarkets.
According to the research team, this is an important issue because the fish often come from regions with few other economic activities.
- We recently wrote a report on the subject with colleagues at the University of Akureyri in Iceland and Denmark’s Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, says Prof Asche. “This has been published by the UN Food Programme.
Access
Raising their gaze to the world gives the UiS researchers constant access to new knowledge, the professor notes.
- By listening to an international network, we can benefit from recent discoveries at a very early stage.
Mutual exchange of knowledge is important in this context, he adds:
- That requires us to publish actively and build a reputation which makes us interesting to other researchers.
- To arouse their curiosity, it’s also advantageous to be able to participate in as many conferences as possible. I usually make about 10 trips abroad every year to attend such meetings and to maintain my network.
Prof Asche reports that he will be visiting the University of Rhode Island next year.
Spells abroad are equally important for Prof Tveterås, who recently spent two months at the University of California in Davis. He took part of his PhD there, and has since visited every year.
Attracting foreign researchers to Stavanger is another key element. So far this year, seafood specialists have visited from the universities of Rhode Island, Akureyri, California and Portsmouth as well as New York State University.
Text: Egil Rugland
Photo: Elisabeth Tønnessen
