Blue Revolution Revisited
by Inka Milewski
Heather & Issac and vying for first followed by Dawn Marie at Friendship. There were a lot of big boats doing some fast dancing at the races this season. Winter harbor attracted boats and a crowd. Good racing prizes and the annual lobster festival helped. ©Photo by Sam Murfitt
It’s not clear when the term ‘Blue Revolution’ was coined to describe the industrialization of aquaculture. By the late 1990s, in the wake of declining wild fish stocks, policy analysts, scientists, economists and government agencies around the world began touting the Blue Revolution as the “next frontier for humankind’s food.” Traditional fisheries were being described as “Stone Age” and their technology as primitive as those of “hunter-gatherer” societies.
While hailed as the world’s next major source of protein, farmed fish represents a very small portion (6 percent) of per capita global protein consumption. According to the most recent data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, plants and animals still represent about 80 percent of the primary source of protein for most of the world’s population. Globally aquaculture is dominated (89.1 percent) by seaweeds, crustaceans and freshwater fish production. Farmed salmon represents only 2.8 percent of global aquaculture production.
