USSEC Korea recently discussed the value of soy with researchers at the Aquafeed Research Center (ARC) and the National Fisheries Research & Development Institute (NFRDI).  USSEC Aquaculture Utilization Technical Director - Korea In Soo Shin used Foreign Market Development (FMD) funds to work with researchers to discuss their 2013 research results.  Talks focused on the project to evaluate digestibility and nutritional values of feed ingredients for aqua feed production.  USSEC emphasized that soybean meal and soy protein concentrate showed 87% in protein digestibility and 70% and 76% in energy digestibility, respectively, indicating that soy products were better than eight other plant-origin protein meals showing 73-88% in protein digestibility and 59-76% in energy digestibility.  In addition, USSEC explained that plant-origin protein meals were lower in heavy metals, dioxin and Salmonella concentration than animal-origin protein meals, indicating that soy products are more advantageous in view of food safety.  Mr. Shin shared the results of USSEC’s feeding demonstration, conducted in China in 2012 on turbot, in which soy protein concentrate was included at 40% in diet as a tool to replace fish meal with soy protein concentrate in flounder feed.
Based on the information provided by USSEC, NFRDI plans to develop a project to examine if soybean meal or soy protein concentrate can replace up to 40% of fish meal in flounder feed (24% in diet).  Flounder is the most preferred species of fish in Korea and more than 40,000 metric tons of flounder are produced through aquaculture annually.