In our journey through the mass of reports and papers on seaweed and seaweed harvesting there are several reports that stand out.
These reports are vital because they are not scientific journals, they are not produced from any point of view other than that of seaweed harvesting as an industry and business.
In other words if you want to become involved in harvesting seaweed commercially these are the papers to read as they are from impeccable sources and are not in any way partisan other than to provide information for the industry
The three reports in this article are produced by the Irish department of the environment, the Northern Irish heritage service and the Scottish governments respectively.
We have reported on these articles before but separately.
They all say the same thing ultimately – commercial mechanized seaweed harvesting is not sustainable.
The Northern Irish report (ref UK)
seaweed harvesting niehs position statement
Front page
Snip from above document ref mechanical harvesting
Mechanical harvesting unsustainable
The Irish government report
from above report – signatures
international contributors
contributors
biased reports
The Scottish government report
Front page
consequences of large scale harvesting
Details of consequences
sustainable commercial harvesting Norway and Chile
These 3 reports clearly state that Mechanical commercial seaweed harvesting is not sustainable – though the last snip says that it is sustainable in Chile and Norway but not anywhere else – could this be because those governments could not be seen as allowing anything to occur in their territory which is not sustainable.
The Chilean coast is suffering from massive environmental problems – the Norwegian coast is undergoing massive changes to the ecology, large areas are now closed to fisheries – both countries have largely uncontrolled industrial fish farming.