of sea fish for aquaculture feed, for example the 1990s near-collapse of food webs dependent on sandeels in parts of the Northwest Atlantic.

2.7.4 Key changes in aquaculture
Aquaculture, while practiced for centuries across NAE, has grown in importance since the 1940s, in most parts of the region except for CEE. In Canada, for example, the in­dustry is growing at 20% per year. There have been very large increases in aquaculture—both freshwater and saltwa­ter—across NAE, propelled in part by explosive growth in salmon production. Despite this growth, North American aquaculture represents 15% or less of wild fishery landings by weight.
     In the US, salmon has overtaken oysters as the major saltwater aquaculture and is the most important aquacul­ture crop in Canada. Salmon production is very important in Northern Europe, fuelled by good prices in the 1970s and 1980s. However, by the late 1990s, prices had dropped precipitously.
     Due to developments in AKST, intensive rearing meth­ods came to dominate aquaculture production. These pro­duction systems required the development of specialized feeds and control of fungal and bacterial diseases. Increases in salmon production were possible because of new tech­niques for saltwater production. However, the environmen­tal impacts of these intensive production systems has caused aquaculture research to shift to addressing pollution con­cerns, pesticide residues and impacts on ecosystems.

2.8   Key Changes in Post-Harvest and Consumption Systems
Postwar consumer desire for adequate and safe food at mod­est prices has driven some of the changes described in the last few subchapters. We now turn our attention to changes in the consumption systems that exist across NAE. In line with trends across the OECD, the share of overall consumer spending on essentials (food, clothing, energy) has declined in Europe; in the UK, it has halved in 40 years. In the UK, one pound in three spent on food is spent away from home and in Ireland it is estimated that one Euro in every four is spent away from home (Henchion and McIntyre, 2004). Declining relative expenditure on food and even food price deflation is a major factor in the level of competition in food retail.

2.8.1 Changes in the food retail sector in NAE
Food retailing has experienced significant changes since 1945. Today, the giants of European food retail are Ger­many, France and the UK, based on their high populations and mature markets. The ownership structure of the larg­est companies in European food retail is varied. Carrefour (the world's second largest retailer) and Tesco are publicly held. Metro is publicly held, but with a large proportion owned by founder Otto Beisheim, the Haniel group and the Schmidt-Ruthebeck family. Rewe is a cooperative owned by its 3000 retail members, while ITM Intermarché is a consor­tium of independent merchants. Food accounts for around three-quarters of sales for these companies, except Metro where the figure is closer to 50%.
     In 2003, European food retailers accounted for 46% of

all European retail sales. The food retail market in Europe is very mature, but the food retail sector has increased its share of the wider retail market in all but four of 19 countries (France, Spain, Sweden and Denmark) by 19% to €870bn between 1999 and 2003. Tesco's sales rose by 54% and Wal-Mart Europe by 32% thanks entirely to the Asda opera­tion in the UK. Non-food is the driver of this supermarket growth, since food sales are relatively stagnant.
     There is a close relationship between per capita GDP and the penetration of "modern" retail (Figure 2-21). But what is interesting from a European perspective are the out­riders, such as Italy with about 20% below that predicted and the UK, which is about 15% above that predicted by this relationship. Whether this phenomenon points to du­rable exceptions to the rule based on cultural or policy dif­ferences, or simply to time lags in some countries, is not currently clear.
     In CEE countries, the penetration of large supermar­ket chains in the national food retail markets is quickly ap­proaching saturation. The EU average is 15 hypermarkets per one million inhabitants. Hungary has 10 million inhab­itants and by the end of 2005 there will be 98 hypermarkets in the country. Hypermarkets in Hungary now account for around a quarter of the market. Modern retailing already has an 18% share of the Russian market. This trend to­wards supermarket penetration in food retail has decreased the number of farmers' markets in many CEE countries.
     While there is a general trend toward concentration in Europe, the emerging structures of food retail are not always the same (Dobson et al., 2001). These authors use a typol­ogy of the dominant firm (when the market share of the top firm is >25% and at least twice as high as the second rated firm), the duopoly, the asymmetric oligopoly, the symmetric oligopoly and unconcentrated structure (when no firm has a market share >10%) (Table 2-7). In 1999 Italy was the only country ranked as "unconcentrated", though this no longer applies now that Coop Italia has a 12.5% share.
     The internationalization of retail in Europe has been, by comparison with other sectors, a recent phenomenon. There is still quite a strong national characteristic to food retailing in many Western European countries (Table 2-8) though this (1) hides high levels of international collaboration between firms in pan-European sourcing to increase buying power, with buying groups especially strong in Scandinavia and (2) the rise of the deep discounters such as Aldi up the ranks of national players. Food retail in most CEE countries is domi­nated by the multinational chains. The top 10 retailers in the Czech Republic, for example, are all multinationals. Never­theless, some domestic cooperatives, trade associations and retail chains (such as COOP, CBA and Reál in Hungary, or VP Market in the Baltic countries) have been able to hold their own against competition by international retailers.
     Internationalization allows retailers to use their distri­bution systems for pan-European procurement. Tesco, for instance, exports Hungarian products under its private la­bels; the firm announced last year it aimed to export HUF 1 billion in Hungarian goods in 2005, with increases of Hun­garian goods to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. French-owned hypermarket Auchan also said recently it will increase the sale of Hungarian products outside Hungary's borders to HUF 5 billion in several years' time.