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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: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Monday October 21 2024, @03:48PM

  by khallow (3766) on Monday October 21 2024, @03:48PM (#1377932) Journal

  There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
  
  Yes, I'll grant the graph is accurate and consistent. I'll grant that percentage growth is "the way" to look at population trends.
  
  What that graph underplays is the fact that numerically, we have been adding 75 million to 80 million living humans to global population annually, consistently for a long long time.

  In other words, Unixnut is right, but you have to use "lies, damn lies, and statistics" to downplay it.

  The "settled science" says to look at the percentages and take comfort in their downward trend. The math says: linear growth is much less scary than the exponential growth usually associated with population trends. The ground truth is: 2.3 additional human mouths to feed every second of every day, and a continuing growth in resource consumption per mouth, both through growth of the high consuming nations through immigration, and in economic development of the rest of the world.

  The truth is that we are seeing population growth slow both in percent and absolute terms. It's time to think about why that happens rather than downplay it for ideological reasons.

  My life experience says: all these trends are meaningless, unpredictable future events are more likely to render current trends irrelevant than it is likely that these trends continue on their current trajectory until we "soft land" at a controlled population decline.

  You have no life experience to contribute here.

  Parent

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