A multi-story serial from Hakai magazine, August 24, 2020:
As the world’s population swells to 9.7 billion, industry and governments say aquaculture is the way to provide protein to the people—if that’s true, can we learn from the past and avoid screwing over the planet and each other?
Congratulations to the whole team on winning a Canadian Online Publishing Award and a Society of Environmental Journalists Award for this series.
To raise fish in captivity is not easy.
A fish farmer has to figure out how to ensure a pond or container has enough oxygen; how to keep birds and other predators away; how to feed the fish, keep them disease free, and manage their waste.
This has not changed since Fan Li was fighting predators—mythical flood dragons that flew away with his carp—at his ponds in China in 475 BCE, when he wrote the first document on aquaculture. What has definitely changed is technique. No longer do aquaculturists insist on releasing fish into a pond without a splash on the seventh day of the second month of the year, as Fan did.
Today, technology has turned aquaculture—the cultivation and harvest of fish, bivalves, crustaceans, algae, and aquatic plants—into the world’s fastest growing food production sector. From 1990 to 2018, global aquaculture production rose 527 percent. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is betting that aquaculture will be a critical source of nutrition for the world’s population, which is estimated to reach 9.7 billion by 2050.
The challenge is how to farm aquatic species sustainably. Thanks to our ability to share information, we have some foresight into the problems we may face, unlike when humanity took the leap into plant cultivation with wheat about 12,000 years ago, or when we domesticated sheep and goats a few thousand years after, in what is today Turkey. The world’s total human population at the dawn of agriculture was anywhere from four million to 10 million or so—today the population of Tokyo falls around the upper end of that estimate.
The Agricultural Revolution was a gradual process, unplanned, and arising independently around the world. For hunters and foragers to continue their ways of life proved difficult amidst a bunch of people hell-bent on farming. As Colin Tudge wrote in Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers, “People did not invent agriculture and shout for joy. They drifted or were forced into it, protesting all the way.”
Farming is hard work. Humans had no clue that all that effort would lead to mechanization and industrialization and would transform 50 percent of the Earth’s habitable space into agricultural lands. Nor did they anticipate that irrigating crops would take 70 percent of global water use, or that producing food would directly contribute to 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The cultivation of cows has been particularly problematic—they generate more emissions than any other animal species except for humans.
As is the case with terrestrial plants and animals, the environmental impacts of growing aquatic species run the spectrum of benign to malign. Bivalves, plants, and algae? Relatively benign. Finfish and crustaceans? Not so much. Feed, disease, and pollution issues plague these industries. Open-net salmon farms, for example, can contaminate the surrounding seabed with waste and pesticides. An overreliance on antibiotics is common in some industries, for instance, in shrimp farming where disease can wipe out 40 percent or more of the product globally in any given year. And farmers of fish—particularly carnivorous species, such as salmon—have traditionally leaned heavily on the world’s wild forage fisheries to make fish meal....
....MUCH MORE
Including: "Show Me the Money Fish" and "Hold the Salt: The Promise of Little Fresh Fishes"
