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The Utilization of Seaweed in the world
Marine algae consists of plantonic algae (micro algae) and benthic algae (macro algae).
Benthic algae falls into three groups based on pigmentation; brown, red and green.
Brown algae is usually large but red and green algae smaller.
Many species of all groups are used for human consumption.
The use of seaweed as food, medicine and fertilizer dates back thousands of years.
The Chinese used kelp as medicine as far as 3000 BC.
Seaweed was considered a delicacy since the age of Confucius.
Seaweed has been used for human consumption and as fertilizer throughout Europe and the British Isles for hundreds of years.
Today, seaweed is mostly traded as a food product on the world market.
Use of seaweed as food has strong roots in Asian countries such as China, Japan and the Republic of Korea,
but demand for seaweed as food has now also spread to North America,
South America and Europe with immigrants from those countries and with increasing interest in oriental food.
Seaweed has been harvested and used in Iceland since the first Viking settlements.
Some speculations are on the origins of this use.
The knowledge of seaweed could have arrived in the country with our Irish ancestors,
as the use of seaweed for human consumption was widespread in the British Isles.
In Ireland, Iceland, Nova Scotia (Canada) and the east cost of US seaweed has traditionally been eaten,
and this market is being developed. Some government and commercial organizations in France have been promoting seaweeds for restaurant and domestic use, with some success.
Icreasing interest in seaweed consumtion is in California and Hawai broght by a lot of Japanies living there.
Growing healthfood marked in Europ and America rices the demand for seaweed production as it is considered helthy.
Total annual use by the global seaweed industry is about 8 million tonnes of wet seaweed.
Most of this is used as food products for human consumption while smaller part is used as fertilizers and animal feed additives.
Increasing demand over the last fifty years outstripped the ability to supply requirements from natural (wild) stocks.
Research into the life cycles of these seaweeds has led to the development of cultivation industries, in about 35 countries,
that now produce more than 90 percent of the market's demand.
China is the largest producer of edible seaweeds, harvesting about 5 million wet tonnes.
The greater part of this is for kombu, produced from hundreds of hectares of the brown seaweed, Laminaria japonica, that is grown on suspended ropes in the ocean.
The Republic of Korea grows about 800 000 wet tonnes of three different species, and about 50 percent of this is for wakame,
produced from a different brown seaweed, Undaria pinnatifida, grown in a similar fashion to Laminaria in China.
Japanese production is around 600 000 wet tonnes and 75 percent of this is for nori, the thin dark seaweed wrapped around a rice ball in sushi.
Various red and brown seaweeds are used to produce three hydrocolloids: agar, alginate and carrageenan.
Today, approximately 1 million tonnes of wet seaweed are harvested and extracted to produce the above three hydrocolloids.
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