Napier, MSCNewsWire, Thursday 23 June 2016 - Fish farming offers a limitless premium value export for New Zealand yet remains restricted by a broad pressure group lobby that encompasses the privileged and the politically correct. This opposition spectrum is resistant to the need for both rural employment and premium value exports.

Tasmania for example produces four times the quantity of farmed salmon a year than does New Zealand .

Trout farming the main target of the lobby spectrum is commonplace in even densely populated countries such as Britain. It is utterly banned in the sparsely populated New Zealand.

The New Zealand specialist in aquaculture technology is Auckland-based Scanz which has long been active in Australia where the industry is given a substantially free reign.

Scanz, named for its Scandinavian equipment sources, supplies the relatively fledgling salmon industry here with equipment at the hatcheries and process factories.

The company also supplies equipment for the downstream end of the meat processing sector’s boning and cuts.

It has recently put its shoulder to the added value dairy diversification cause by supplying equipment into the manufacturing-grade cheese sector.

Meanwhile aquaculture in Australia is the country's fastest growing primary industry, accounting for 34% of the total gross value of production of seafood. Ten species of fish are farmed there.

In New Zealand the sector remains stalled on the twin shoals of privilege (fishermen) and environment (Greens et al).

This coalition has made fish farming the lightening rod of fashionable ideals to the exclusion for example of the plunder of the non-renewable sea beds by hobbyists and commercial interests alike.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' deskThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.