August 24, 2012 — If you like anchovies on your pizza you'd better be careful," warns Mark Livingston, investment director of Fidelity Worldwide Investment.
You would not expect the head of a global asset fund managing £138bn of pensions and investments to care about the cost of pizza toppings. But the global nature of the food chain means severe storms off the coast of Peru have led to a dramatic jump in the price of the oily fish – which will in turn lead to a spike in Scottish farmed fish, Chinese pigs and even Omega 3 tablets in Holland & Barratt.
"That's the nature of today's food business – everything's connected," Livingston says. "If you can catch some anchovies you'll make some serious money."
And that's why Livingston cares about this silvery-coloured fish. Three years ago Fidelity spotted the growing importance of the "forgotten fish" and invested in Copeinca, a Norwegian company that owns a fleet of 30 Peruvian anchovy fishing boats and five processing plants across the country.
Just a few years ago no one outside of the fish oil industry really paid much attention to anchovies and they were lumped together with other unloved fish under the unappetising label "industrial fish".
"It covers all the stuff we don't consume directly. We caught 18m tonnes of industrial fish last year, which represents 20% of all fish caught worldwide," says Gorjan Nikolik, associate director of animal protein at Rabobank.
These fish are caught in massive quantities, dried, minced and ground down into fish meal [a brown powder made mostly from fish bones and fish offal] and fish oil [which is extracted from the tissues of oily fish].
Read the full story at the Guardian.