Aquaculture

A Growing Industry with Big Plans

by Laurie Schreiber

NOAA Aquaculture’s director has cited Norway, the world’s largest salmon producer,
as a model for U.S. fin fish aquaculture development.

PORTLAND – Aquaculture is poised to play a major role in feeding humanity, as the world’s population ticks upward from today’s 7 billion to 8 billion in another decade.

It’s predicted that, in 2015, worldwide consumption of farmed seafood will outweigh consumption of wild-caught seafood. Given the industry’s growth, seafood farmers are looking at issues of continued production increase and long-term sustainability, according to speakers at a Nov. 11 webinar hosted by SeafoodSource.com, a Portland-based online business tool for seafood industry professionals.

The webinar was offered as a preview of issues to be explored in-depth during the SeaWeb Seafood Summit, Feb. 9-11 in New Orleans, La. The summit will include a focus on the global impact of expanded aquaculture production in the future. At that time, speakers will discuss the global importance of aquaculture in meeting world protein needs; traceability and its impact on seafood value chains; fishery and aquaculture improvement projects; preventing human rights abuses in seafood supply chains; and economic and ecosystem resilience and the role of the seafood industry, according to the summit’s website.

Speaking at the preview were Michael Tlusty, director of Ocean Sustainability Science at the New England Aquarium; and marine biologist Neil Anthony Sims, co-CEO of Kampachi Farms in Hawaii. Kampachi Farms is using new technologies to produce sustainable seafood, including an Aquapod – an unanchored fish pen tethered to a drifting boat that allows sashimi-grade kampachi, a fish native to Hawaii, to be farmed in their natural environment up to 75 miles offshore, according to the company’s website.

According to Tlusty, production efficiency is key to long-term sustainability.

“When we think about how humans relate to seafood, we’re living on the backs of fish,” Tlusty said. “A lot of human evolution was driven around fish in the sea.”

Fish has great health benefits as a protein, he said. They’re also energy-efficient to grow, compared with farmed terrestrial proteins such as beef and pork.

“They need fewer resources to grow than any terrestrial protein,” Tlusty said.

Farmed fish is critical to the world’s overall increase in fish consumption, he said. In the U.S., about 57 percent of seafood consumption is based on aquaculture. In the future, he predicted, farmed fish will constitute two-thirds of seafood consumption.

However, there are certain ideas about wild fish that don’t apply to farmed fish, he said. For example, big fish are important in the wild; it means they are healthy and reproducing at a sustainable level. In aquaculture, a big fish is old and doesn’t convert feed to protein well. Studies show that production increases when fish are harvested at a smaller size.

“So we have to rethink aquaculture for the unique products it can provide,” Tlusty said.

“Aquaculture is important. It’s here to stay,” said Tlusty. “It’s important for creating food globally and domestically, and we need to rethink how we’re creating our products – what’s the appropriate size, what’s the appropriate species, and how does it compare with other proteins.”

Tlusty said producers must also look at issues around waste. Fresh fish is thrown away more frequently than frozen fish because it goes bad.

“If you throw it away, it’s not sustainable,” he said. “The minute it hits the trash, we blew whatever work we put into it. There’s a lot of work we can put into wasting less food….So we want to rethink not only what we’re creating, but how we’re marketing and distributing it.”

Tlusty said the industry must also think about environmental impacts.

“Environmental certification comes into play. We need to have people and organizations out there that are setting standards to make sure everybody is producing with regard to specific environmental impacts,” he said.

Tlusty proposed a system that allows producers to work toward levels of certification. He said only 5 percent of aquaculture product are currently certified as sustainable. “We need to reach out to the other 95 percent, reach out to small farmers, give them aces sot the marketplace,” he said. “Certification shouldn’t operate in a bubble. Certification creates a dialogue around what sustainability is.

We can’t have a single low bar for certification. There needs to be several levels of certification.”

Sims said the discussion around sustainability and certification has been going on meaningfully for only about the past 10 years.

“We need to give these programs time to become established, and to be able to help people see where the incentives lie,” Sims said. “The collaboration that exists now, and the synergy that exists between different forms of certification, all help to move sectors of any one production system to a more sustainable footing. It’s collaborative now rather than competitive. And even though it’s early in the game, there are significant measures of success.” For example, he said, around 70 percent of global salmon production is part of a certification system.

“That has the potential to have a huge impact,” Sims said. “It’s started to have change on the water. How do we increase the change? I think there needs to be greater transparency in the certification process. And education is key. Buyers are driving the certification process.”

Aquaculture issues are complicated by the fact that the industry uses a public resource – bodies of salt or fresh water.

“There’s going to be competition for those, and there’s going to be displacement of people using those resources,” said Sims. “The development of aquaculture has happened in a moment of history when there’s a lot more corporatization, a lot more commercialization, globalization, and it has scaled up faster” than terrestrial farming. The image people have of terrestrial agriculture is the family farm, although today that’s mostly been displaced by industrial farming. Aquaculture, by contrast, has transitioned from the original small-scale systems more rapidly, to large companies that are driving innovation and are able to achieve efficiencies, Sims said.

“It’s not a bad thing that you have large corporations involved, because they can invest more in the R&D an the certification programs,” Sims said. “Corporatization is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s perceived as that.

Commercial fishing interests may perceive aquaculture as competition, he said. “This is a tragedy. We need to be eating more seafood. If we have 3 billion people moving into the middle class, if they’re eating beef and pork, the planet will be in a lot of trouble….Aquaculture is the only way we can scale up to meet that growing demand.”

The biggest obstacle to the industry’s growth, said Sims, “is what I’ve come to call the preservation community.” This contrasts with the conservation community, in that the latter seeks to move the planet forward to a more sustainable footing, whereas “preservationists,” he said, seek to preserve the status quo.

“But the status quo is pretty bleak,” if humanity continues to rely mainly on terrestrial agricultural animal proteins, which have a significant impact on greenhouse gases. “We need to start to displace future beef production that is going to have a tremendous impact on global climate change,” Sims said. “Without the preservationists starting to change, to help lead a change in public perception, aquaculture isn’t going to be able to take off.”

Disease and feed-sourcing are also two of aquaculture’s biggest challenges.

“Constant vigilance must be a watchword,” Sims said of diseases such as infectious salmon anemia (ISA). “There needs to be collective action.” With ISA in Chile, for example, “there needs to be a deeper understanding to the ecological limits to growth. You can’t keep pushing an ecosystem. At some stage it’s going to bite back,” Sims said. “But overall, these diseases are things we’ll need to manage around. Terrestrial agriculture does the same thing. There are in any other crop, or in animal protein production, diseases that farmers have to manage around. Somehow, the perception in aquaculture is that diseases are a symptom of the unsustainability of production. That comes back to aquaculture getting a bad rap.”

With regard to feed for farmed sea products, Tlusty said, ideally, the industry should not be using resources that feed humans. “Currently, we’re doing research on growing bacteria to replace fishmeal,” Tlusty said. “A lot of work is going into insect proteins as a way to turn into fish. Those are great projects that we need to encourage.”

“Aquaculture,” said Sims, “is often accused of feed inefficiencies. Aquaculture is far more efficient, in terms of feed efficiencies, than other forms of animal protein production. So it’s a red herring. Whether you’re feeding fishmeal to grow fish or using alternative sources of protein, we should be increasing aquaculture production. That’s how we make a more sustainable planet. That’s how we feed more people.”