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Why Farming Fish Is More Unsustainable Than Catching Them In The Wild

posted by mrpg on Monday October 21 2024, @11:42AM   
from the so-long... dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

It has been claimed that fish farming is a sustainable source of food that will help us feed the growing global human population while protecting wild fish populations – but this isn’t true.

“Fish farming is not a substitute for catching wild fish out of the ocean,” says Matthew Hayek at New York University. “In fact, it relies on catching wild fish out of the ocean.”

Hayek and his colleagues have shown that the amount of wild fish killed in order to feed farmed fish is between 27 and 307 per cent higher than previous estimates.

Farmed carnivorous fish eat multiple times more weight in wild fish caught from the ocean than is obtained by farming them, says Hayek. For instance, producing a kilogram of salmon may require 4 or 5 kilograms of wild fish.

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Original Submission

• Re:It's all in how you do it.(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday October 21 2024, @03:45PM

  by khallow (3766) on Monday October 21 2024, @03:45PM (#1377930) Journal

  It's the same old argument that applies against beef farming. People pay premium for meat, so it "works" economically to use all that land for pasture to produce beef, but if that same land were put toward producing human food directly, instead of for feed stock for animals, the more direct path from sunlight to people's gut is more efficient: cut out the middle processes.

  OTOH, a lot of land can't be used for agriculture, but it can be used for pasture. So there is no direct path to human food directly for that land.

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