Aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production sector in the world. It already produces more than half of the fish eaten in the world today. But this rapid growth in demand also brings challenges. Badly managed fish farms can create a number of serious problems, including:. The bigger the aquaculture industry becomes, the greater its potential impact — for good or bad — on the environment, on workers and on local communities. So this is the mission of all us here at the ASC: to help the industry to play its crucial part in feeding a growing global population while still respecting the planet and its people.
We set standards and oversee an independent certification process to ensure that any seafood products you buy and eat have been produced responsibly, without harming local communities, workers or the environment. Just look for the ASC logo! Find out all about seafood farming, and the crucial role of responsible aquaculture in feeding a growing global population. Aquaculture is a method used to produce food and other commercial products, restore habitat and replenish wild stocks, and rebuild populations of threatened and endangered species.
There are two main types of aquaculture—marine and freshwater. NOAA efforts primarily focus on marine aquaculture, which refers to farming species that live in the ocean and estuaries. How to do that without spreading disease and pollution? For tilapia farmer Bill Martin, the solution is simple: raise fish in tanks on land, not in pens in a lake or the sea. You compare that with a percent controlled environment, possibly as close to zero impact on the oceans as we can get.
To keep his fish alive, he needs a water-treatment system big enough for a small town; the electricity to power it comes from coal. Martin recirculates about 85 percent of the water in his tanks, and the rest—high in ammonia and fish waste—goes to the local sewage plant, while the voluminous solid waste heads to the landfill. To replace the lost water, he pumps half a million gallons a day from an underground aquifer.
But those goals are still a few years away. And though Martin is convinced that recirculating systems are the future, so far only a few other companies are producing fish—including salmon, cobia, and trout—in tanks on land. Able to hold hundreds of thousands of fish, but less densely stocked and better flushed than nearshore salmon pens, they produce little pollution. Cobia contain as much healthy fish oil as salmon do.
On a calm day in May the year-old president of Open Blue and I are lying at the bottom of a massive, diamond-shaped fish cage, 60 feet beneath the cobalt blue surface of the Caribbean, watching 40, cobia do a slow, hypnotic pirouette above us.
The bubbles from our regulators rise up to meet them; one pauses to stare into my mask. In the early s the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery and the import tariffs imposed on Norwegian salmon bankrupted the family business. Now, off Panama, he operates the largest offshore fish farm in the world. He has some employees, a big hatchery onshore, and a fleet of bright orange vessels to service a dozen of the giant cages, which can hold more than a million cobia.
A popular sport fish, cobia has been caught commercially only in small quantities—in the wild the fish are too solitary—but its explosive growth rate makes it popular with farmers. Last year he shipped tons of cobia to high-end restaurants around the U. Next year he hopes to double that amount—and finally turn a profit. Maintenance and operating costs are high in offshore waters. They suspect the diluted waste is being scavenged by undernourished plankton, since the offshore waters are nutrient poor.
Public concerns over pollution and fierce opposition from commercial fishermen have made coastal states leery of any fish farms. His four cages left each produce 5 to 13 tons of shrimp every four to six months.
They have less impact than a conventional shrimp farm, but they require Mexican government subsidies. They have one big advantage over land animals: You have to feed them a lot less. It takes roughly a pound of feed to produce a pound of farmed fish; it takes almost two pounds of feed to produce a pound of chicken, about three for a pound of pork, and about seven for a pound of beef. Different sources of animal protein in our diet place different demands on natural resources.
By this measure, farming salmon is about seven times more efficient than raising beef. In Latin America and the Caribbean, over the past decade, salmonids have overtaken shrimp as the top aquaculture species group following disease outbreaks in major shrimp-producing areas and rapid growth in salmon production in Chile. The sub-Saharan Africa region continues to be a minor player in aquaculture despite its natural potential.
Even aquaculture of tilapia, which is native to the continent, has not developed significantly. Nigeria leads in the region, with reported production of 44 tonnes of catfish, tilapia and other freshwater fishes. There are some encouraging signs in the continent: black tiger shrimp Penaeus monodon in Madagascar and Eucheuma seaweed in the United Republic of Tanzania are thriving, and production of niche species such as abalone Haliotis spp.
All regions showed increases in production from to , led by the Near East and North Africa region and Latin America and the Caribbean with World aquatic plant production in reached Japanese kelp Laminaria japonica — 4. An additional 2. The production of aquatic plants increased rapidly from the total of The growth in production of the different major species groups continues, although the increases seen so far this decade are less dramatic than the extraordinary growth rates achieved in the s and s Figure 11, Table 5.
Growth rates for the production of the other species groups have begun to slow and the overall rate of growth, while still substantial, is not comparable with the significant rate increases seen in the previous two decades.
Thus, while the trend for the near future appears to be one of continued increases in production, the rate of these increases may be moderating. Figure 12 presents an overview of aquaculture production in terms of quantity and value by major species group for
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