Talking Anchovy In September 2008, the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) published its List of Fish to Eat and Fish to Avoid, including anchovy from the Bay of Biscay.  Many in the media picked up on this story but sloppily extended the ban to all anchovies.  This led to a small trickle of variously outraged and annoyed inquiries about our anchovies.  This story underlines how easy it is to become confused about fish.  It starts with a fundamental and understandable mistake from the MCS since the Bay of Biscay has been closed to fishing for over 3 years so even if you wanted to buy anchovy from there, you couldn't! 

Most the Spanish/Cantabrian sea (same as Bay of Biscay) brands of anchovy are actually sourced in Argentina where there is a huge number of joint ventures and Spanish owned fishing businesses.  Our own anchovy is from the Mediterranean where stocks are basically still ok - though overfishing is possibly occurring.  Anchovy is a difficult fish to "understand" (ok they all are) - it's at the bottom of the food chain, eats micro-food, zooplanktons, etc, reproduces really, really fast so populations can boom and bust quite rapidly; this not just as a result of fishing pressure but also because of a change in food supply, in climate, in currents and in predator populations.  All have an impact on populations.  We were in fact told at the end of 2007 by one of our packers that the Bay of Biscay stock has recovered but that surprisingly the Spanish fleet wanted to keep the moratorium going for another year. 

But there are two bigger issues than local population stocks for sustainability of anchovy in our opinion.  These are, in order: A/ fish farming:-  There is a huge business in ranching/farming bluefin tuna which is a very valuable fish in terms of the price it sells for but it takes between 10Kg to 25Kg of small fish like anchovy to create 1Kg of bluefin tuna.  There are a lot of farms in the Mediterranean and therefore a lot of pressure on local anchovy stocks.  The bluefin business involves mafias and illegal fishing in huge quantities. B/ effluent/nitrate run off from intensive farms:-  intensive farming, use of mass feeds for animals and mass chemical fertilisers on land.  These run-off into rivers and water systems.  In fact some European water companies pay farmers to farm organic as it is cheaper than de-polluting the water supply.   This pollution run off goes into river estuaries and coastal areas.  The nitrates cause an excessive blooming of algae.  This algae results in asphyxiation or "eutrophication" whereby oxygen is sucked out of the sea, leading to vast dead zones: no plant life, no micro-organism, no fish.

Many scientific studies have been published on this phenomenon of eutrophication, one of which came out last year, referenced Diaz and Rosenberg, who published a global overview of marine dead zones.  The subject was even covered in the MCS's "Silent Seas" report released in autumn 2008.  One of the dead zones in the Diaz and Rosenberg study was the Bay of Biscay where several important rivers carry down the nitrate pollution for heavily over-farmed lands.

So what about Fish4Ever anchovy?  It's not on the MCS avoid list.  We avoided the Bay of Biscay 5/6 years ago because we knew there was population risk.  In the Mediterranean we support local small fishing boats that have always fished this resource.  We specify a minimum size of fish to not buy fish that has been caught too small.  We also support a local packer who has a lovely artisan approach and uses a great locally grown organic olive oil.  By doing this, we help to germinate a sustainability opinion, and if there is an overfishing problem for anchovy in the Mediterranean, it is essentially due to the bluefin farming industry.   Finally we are an organic company and only use organic land ingredients - a sustainability plus which almost no other company or system of marine sustainability requires - and yet as shown above (and for other reasons) sustainable agriculture has a clear impact on the marine environment.  Oh and our anchovy got three gold awards at the Guild of FineFood's annual Great Taste awards!