Natural,artificial or imported? Ice supplies for the German distant-water fisheries as an example of renewable vs. fossil-fuel based supplies

Abstract

From the early decades of the twentieth century the distant-water fishing fleets relied more or less completely on the use of artificially manufactured ice for the preservation of their catches. Large-scale fossil-fuel powered ice factories in the main European fishing ports provided the ice taken onboard trawlers before they left port for the fishing trip. When the fishing grounds of the Barents Sea and the Svalbard region were developed in the 1930s, bunker capacities of trawlers were no longer sufficient for a journey without re-bunkering coal or ice. Northern Norwegian ports therefore became regularly used as bunker stations for coal and ice, with huge natural ice factories being developed in northern Norway for the supply of trawlers. Those with interests in artificial ice production in continental Europe, particularly in Bremerhaven/Geestemünde, started a campaign against the use of natural ice based on the argument that natural ice was unsanitary and would cause bacterial contamination of the fish. Several authorities became involved and finally an expedition by the Reichskuratorium für Technik in der Landwirtschaft was organized to investigate the issue of bacterial contamination of ice manufactured in northern Norway. With the findings of this expedition clearly showing that there was no contamination issue with the natural ice, it became obvious that the whole campaign against natural ice was not guided by quality concerns, but by the commercial interests of German artificial ice producers. In the end, the whole story can be understood as a key example of how a fossil-fuel powered industry tried to push a competitor using a renewable resource (natural ice) out of the market, and how certain authorities were complicit in this attempt.