UN body provokes outrage with call for more fish farming

The Times
March 2, 2009
Frank Pope, Oceans Correspondent

Environmentalists reacted with fury last night after a UN body recommended a big increase in fish farming to meet rising global demand.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said that increasing global demand for fish should be met through intensive fish farming amid falling wild populations.
“If overall production is to keep pace with an expanding world population, and given the strong likelihood that capture fisheries will remain stagnant, future growth will have to come from aquaculture,” itsaid in a report.
World aquaculture has grown dramatically in the past 50 years. In the early 1950s less than a million tonnes was produced. By 2006 this had risen to 51.7million tonnes, with a value of $78.8billion (£55billion) — approaching half the total global fish consumption of 110.4 million tonnes.

Per capita, fish consumption has been increasing steadily from an average of 9.9kg in the 1960s: it reached 11.5kg in the 1970s, 12.5kg in the 1980s, 14.4kg in the 1990s, and 16.4kg in 2005.
China accounts for much of the rise, consuming 33.6 million tonnes in 2005, or 26.1kg per person. China has also had a boom in aquaculture: almost six out of ten farmed fish globally were reared in China, while just under nine out of ten come from the Asia-Pacific region.
Differences in feeding habits, though, could present a stumbling block to bringing Asian-style aquaculture to the West. Cod and salmon — two of the most popular fish in Britain — are both predators, unlike the herbivorous carp that is favoured in the East. Rather than feeding on aquatic plants, cod and salmon must be fed on other fish that are sourced from the wild. Between 1992 and 2006 the amount of fishmeal used to feed farmed fish grew by almost 300 per cent.
The FAO recommendations provoked a backlash from pressure groups. Willie Mackenzie, of Greenpeace, said: “We've totally trashed our wild fish populations so now we need to farm them. It just doesn't make sense to catch fish to feed to fish — you lose four to five times the weight and that's without all the problems of infestations, escapes and pollution from the farms.”
Around 520million people — 8 per cent of the world's population — depend on fisheries for their protein, income or family stability.
How lice spread into wild salmon Case study: The Broughton Archipelago
Farming salmon in the rivers of the Broughton Archipelago off the West Coast of Canada was turning into an ecological nightmare, the journal Science reported in 2007.
Many problems can arise from fish farming: algal blooms and deoxygenated water from the waste. But what did for Broughton's salmon was the lice. Adult fish can handle a few but juveniles are not so strong. The fish farms are near the spawning rivers, and the larval stage of the lice can travel up to 50 miles to infect the juveniles. Wild salmon mortality within range of the farms hit 80 per cent. If the outbreaks continued, scientists warned, the wild salmon populations would be extinct within eight years. Last year a study showed a 90 per cent drop in spawning in the Broughton River compared with 2006.