New Zealand can’t compete on volume as a food exporter but it can build a sustainable aquaculture industry, says Professor Andrea Alfaro whose roots are indigenous South American. Photo / Supplied
By Eloise Gibson, Stuff
New Zealand has long been a food-growing nation but with agriculture (largely for export) making up half of the country’s emissions, people are looking for ways to grow food more cleanly.
A raft of business and research leaders think new markets can be tapped in more sustainable ways. Pāua is one example, suggests Andrea Alfaro, a professor of marine ecology and aquaculture at AUT University.
The sheer scale of the situation struck Alfaro when she was on a bus on a work trip in China.
She’d been bussed along the coast for around three hours, and every bit of ocean she had seen out the window contained cages of growing abalone – a related variety to the black-footed sea snail New Zealanders know as pāua.
Aotearoa’s pāua (which is actually three different species) are among 54 known varieties of abalone worldwide. Although New Zealand's is considered special, it can also end up mingling in markets with other kinds of abalone meat.
Many of these species are endangered, thanks partly to growing in shallow waters where it’s easy to over-fish. This country's own spectacularly coloured pāua are under tremendous pressure from warming and acidifying seas.
Hollow cargo ship farms
In China, the solution is mass-scale farming. “It was farms as far as the eye could see,” Alfaro recalls of her bus trip. “Imagine a New Zealand mussel farm on steroids, multiplied by hundreds and hundreds.”
For every abalone farm she saw, there were also hectares of seaweed farms, producing seaweed to feed the abalone and for other seaweed-related products. Alfaro also saw massive cargo ships – “hollow, and like a giant swimming pool” – filled with more abalone farms, moving up and down the coast to find the correct water temperature.
“The volume is just mind-boggling,” she says. At one point she asked someone how much abalone one of the ships could hold. “It was about the whole production of New Zealand for one year.”
What that staggering experience reinforced to Alfaro – a researcher at AUT, whose speciality is marine ecology and aquaculture – is that New Zealand is never going to compete on volume as a food exporter.
While Alfaro’s personal passion is pāua, her words echo what’s often said by fruit growers, meat farmers and milk producers who are going to added lengths to cut their climate and water pollution footprints: If they try to compete on cost or volume, they’ll fail. Those bare metrics don’t account for important things, like leaving a functioning ecosystem and a liveable climate behind.
Alfaro believes New Zealand can provide quality products, and a framework for producing more sustainable, high-quality food and managing resources more carefully.
Alfaro’s words on pāua echo what’s often said by fruit growers, meat farmers and milk producers regarding balancing cost or volume metrics and a product’s environmental footprint. Photo / Supplied
“That includes adding resilience to species which are being driven to extinction by the rapid climate change effects,” she says.
Alfaro’s vision for a sustainable pāua industry is informed by her collaborations with researchers specialising in matauranga Māori and aquaculture, including Te Rerekohu Tuterangiwhiu at the Cawthron Institute and others. “My roots are indigenous South American. So there are connections for me that are very personal,” she says.
“You don't just manage the species, you manage the ecosystem and everything that interacts within it,” she says. “If we export the fact that we do things differently and our products are different … I think we have a cutting edge opportunity in the market, not just commercially but educationally, for the future of this planet, and for the future of indigenous voices.”
In March, AUT hosted the 11th annual International Abalone Symposium, with more than 200 delegates from around 15 countries. It confirmed to Alfaro that indigenous cultures view sustainable management in similar ways. Matauranga Māori was discussed, and some speakers took the cue to introduce indigenous American and indigenous Asian knowledge into their talks.
“If you think about managing marine species as a member of your family it is very different to managing it to monetise it,” she says. “The product is not just being farmed in isolation, it has culture, it has a life.”
AUT estimates pāua is worth $50 million a year in New Zealand exports. But she says New Zealand could be smarter about this. Some go to Asian markets where it's just another type of pāua. But other, more specific markets, such as Japan, pay “top dollar” for New Zealand abalone products.
Organisers of the 11th International Abalone Symposium aimed to showcase the cultural importance of pāua and demonstrate its use in various novel ways. Photo / Supplied
The belief that there is room to grow was reinforced on the China trip, where Alfaro attended a ritzy pāua symposium banquet, where each guest had an individual, white-gloved server.
“I was thinking ‘Oh' my gosh, this is so over the top’ and they said, ‘In China, when you have a big event like a wedding, and you have money, you put on a banquet that has abalone. If you’re really, really wealthy, you put on New Zealand abalone.”
“Why can’t we take advantage of that, and highlight that our species is different?” she asks.
Alfaro believes the potential is huge, given the current limited export market, including Riveron shell producer Ocean Shell, and farms Moana in Ruakākā and NZ Abalone in Bluff.
When New Zealand hosted the abalone symposium, Alfaro says she and other organisers tried to showcase the cultural importance of pāua. It is the eyes of carved figures around the motu, among other important roles.
Professor Andrea Alfaro with a plate of raw pāua. Pāua canapés served at the International Abalone Symposium, hosted by AUT. Photo / Supplied
“Te Ara Poutama and the Māori student union did a spectacular welcome – there were people crying in the audience and I had never seen scientists at a conference cry before,” she says.
“Their jaws dropped because they had no idea that you could think about pāua, or abalone as something other than a commodity. Or a research animal.”
Although there were no individual white-gloved waiters, three different pāua canapés went “like hot potatoes” – with not a rubbery fritter in sight.
Guests also sampled two pāua-infused beers - a chilli stout and lemony IPA, that Alfaro says “had a light oceany taste”.
Special batches of pāua-infused beers were prepared for the AUT-hosted abalone symposium. Photo / Supplied
People said “Wow, my grandparents used to eat it, but I don’t like it because it’s too rubbery, I never thought about eating pāua like this’. Alfaro says she is still getting requests for the recipes.