With 62 percent of the world’s food fish to come from aquaculture by 2030, according to recent estimates, the expansion of fish farming while minimizing environmental impacts is one of the industry’s greatest challenges.
In the afternoon SeaWeb Seafood Summit panel discussion titled “How Does Aquaculture Meet Growing Needs in a Sustainable Manner?” panelists discussed the greatest opportunities for improvement, the role of education and technology and what species and production regions will experience the greatest growth.
“[Aquaculture is] still a young industry that’s gone through phenomenal growth. Its direct benefit is providing jobs and providing food. It’s just incredible,” said Chris Ninnes, CEO of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) and a former commercial fisherman.
Growth is clearly threatened by the omnipresence of disease, as shrimp farmers in Southeast Asia can certainly attest in dealing with early mortality syndrome (EMS), which cut global shrimp production by as much as 30 percent. Dan Lee, standards coordinator for the Global Aquaculture Alliance’s (GAA) Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) program, said the industry is making progress with EMS but challenges persist.
“The industry grows steadily for a few years and then bang. It’s a repeated pattern,” he said. “It’s a young industry and I’m afraid we’ll repeat that pattern again.”
The industry has its weaknesses, partly because of its relative youth, the panelists agreed. David Little, professor at the University of Stirling (UK), said education is lacking in the industry’s value chain. “The skills people need are not just technical, they’re interdisciplinary. We haven’t quite caught up with that.”
Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association, had pointed remarks about education in aquaculture, saying its focus on operations is severely lacking. “Academia has done a good job at training people who want to go into academia,” he said, “but it sucks at training people going into the operational side of the business.”
Nell Halse, VP-communications for Canadian salmon farming company Cooke Aquaculture, agreed but added that political roadblocks are a commonly shared issue between U.S. and Canadian companies. “We’ve identified that the industry has flatlined in the last 12 years while it’s grown in other parts of the world, as a whole,” she said. “There’s confusion, duplication. We’re still regulated under the [federal] fisheries act, which is from the 1800s when aquaculture didn’t exist. There’s an initiative to work with federal and provincial governments. It’s a huge challenge but a huge opportunity.”
The message about aquaculture, throughout the day of sessions at the Summit, was that educational efforts about farmed seafood need to step up. Belle said that’s on the industry. “Farmers have a responsibility to reach out and educate about what we do and why and what we don’t do and give [politicians] the answers they need so they can answer the questions when they get them,” said Belle. “Politicians don’t often stick their necks out. We haven’t done enough of that as an industry.”
The young aquaculture industry clearly has many more changes left to come if it is to fulfill its promise and the needs thrust upon it to feed a growing global population in need of sustainable protein sources. “Change is a way of doing business, it’s not optional for us anymore,” said Halse.
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