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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   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 21 2024, @10:20PM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 21 2024, @10:20PM (#1378021) Journal
    In addition to Joe's objections consider what happens when you have a lot more farmed predator fish than can be supported naturally. Suppose you have an order of magnitude more farmed tuna or salmon than exists in natural populations. Where does the food coming from - especially if you're trying to support the existing wild population on the same food supply? My take is that one quickly needs to do serious vertical integration - farming everything from the bottom of the food chain on up. The wild supply can't keep up (though it can supplement).

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 22 2024, @04:36PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 22 2024, @04:36PM (#1378133)

    Two counterexamples to your thought experiment:

    The ocean is not exactly overpopulated and at least SOME fisheries have collapsed yet the input to those fisheries is unmodified. Surely the long dead Cod from wiped out Cod fisheries don't need to be fed anymore. Something could eat what they used to eat.

    A pretty big pollution problem for oceans etc is fertilizer runoff. We do NOT have a shortage of algae/krill/similar for little fish to eat. It would probably help a lot with water quality to turn megatons of algae into kilotons of itty bitty feeder fish which can then be turned into tons of canned tuna or similar giant fish.

    The ocean's not a desert where there's a lack of inputs.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22 2024, @04:42PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22 2024, @04:42PM (#1378140)

      I am picturing a bounty of floating trash awash in untreated sewage as the engine of our economic food production miracle. Not even joking...

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 23 2024, @01:19AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 23 2024, @01:19AM (#1378192) Journal
      Keep in mind the argument was that farmed fish weren't lower footprint than fishing the wild equivalent. I can see the point of putting farmed fish in replacement of some natural niches - they would have to go somewhere, but it does further the original argument if you have permanent depletion of natural fish populations.