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THE OCEAN OF LIFE by Callum Roberts

“Farming the Sea”


Excerpt courtesy of Viking Books

The explosion of marine fish farms across the world has transformed
coasts, estuaries, and deltas in dozens of countries. China has pursued
one of the most aggressive aquaculture development programs of
recent years. In 2003, marine aquaculture covered nearly six thousand
square miles, about half of China’s twenty- thousand- mile coastline. 30
Most of these farms were carved out of mangrove forests, mud flats,
salt marshes, and sea grass beds. Satellite photographs of the Bohai
Sea coast, one of the most intensively farmed regions, show the toll
taken. Straight-edged ponds incised in blue and turquoise pack the
coast to depths of a couple of miles inland, and crawl seaward across
mud flats. The Philippines and Vietnam have lost three quarters of their
mangrove forests in the last few decades, half of them to aquaculture.
Sadly, many of these ponds have been abandoned. When mangrove
soils are exposed to the air, they become acidic. The acid leaches into
pond water together with toxic quantities of aluminum, so the ponds
cannot be used unless they are lined.

Mangroves and salt marshes are self- repairing buffers that defend
coasts against storm and flood. If they remain healthy, there is a good
chance they could also ameliorate the worst effects of sea- level rise by
trapping sediment and building upward. In many places aquaculture
has not only removed this benefit, it has caused the land to sink by
sucking freshwater from belowground to create brackish ponds for
shrimp and milkfish.

Ironically, the loss of these habitats starves fish farms of two


things they need most: clean water and animals to stock their ponds.
Coastal wetlands draw nutrients and pollution from the water that
washes through them. They are also nurseries for a huge variety of
fish and shellfish. Although disease has forced many shrimp farmers
to switch to hatchery- raised fry, countless farms throughout the tropics
still depend on wild sources to stock their ponds, despite its catastrophic
environmental cost.

Tiger prawns are much favored for their large size and rapid
growth, but they represent a tiny fraction of wild shrimp fry. Most
wild prawn fry are caught by night lighting in shallow water under a
moonless sky. Within minutes, netters are surrounded by a confusing
buzz of hundreds or thousands of tiny animals, fish and fry, all drawn
to the light like moths to a flame. For every individual tiger prawn
caught in Malaysia and the Philippines, several hundred fry of other
species are wasted. Half of the hundreds of millions of tiger prawns
grown in Bangladesh are from the wild. The waste doesn’t stop at
other shrimp species either. In one study, scientists found that every
tiger prawn fry collected cost the lives of up to hundreds of finfish fry
and over a thousand other animals that live in the plankton.

The wetland grab in developing countries has robbed the poor of


the common lands from which they once eked a living by fishing and
gleaning. Aquaculture provides jobs and income for some of the displaced.
But the divide between rich and poor has grown, and their
quality of life suffers with every waterway blocked, every forest tree
felled, and every pint of pond sludge pumped into the sea. In several
countries, such as Bangladesh, Thailand, and Honduras, some of those
bold enough to protest the injustices have been murdered to quash
opposition.

So far aquaculture has sheltered most of us from the effects of


overfishing. Throughout the developed world supermarket shelves creak
under the weight of an ever expanding range of farmed fish and
shellfish. There is something for everyone if you can afford to pay: sturgeon
caviar, bluefin tuna sashimi, and oysters on the half shell tempt
high-end diners, while there are salmon and shrimp for the masses.
And yet, the amazing expansion of fish farming since 1950 has come
at a terrible cost to coasts, wetlands, and shallow seas. Governments
hell-bent on foreign exchange or job creation have encouraged aquaculture
heedless of warnings. It is not hard to see that it can’t go on
like this.

The drawbacks of aquaculture are such that one might question


whether it really is the solution to overfishing. Wouldn’t it be better
to protect fish in their natural habitat? If we were to manage wild
fisheries well, we might be able to increase supplies from the open sea
by a third to a half. (I will come back later to how we can do this.)
But a 50 percent increase falls far short of the needs of nine billion
hungry people expected by 2050. So if the world aspires to a healthy
diet of fish, aquaculture will be essential. Like any kind of farming,
there are better and worse ways of doing it. The present blue revolution
will need to turn blue- green for aquaculture to become a net contributor
to human well- being. What would it take to do this?

Better farming practice comes in many forms. In some countries,


shrimps are grown in ponds at low enough densities that nature can
feed them without the need for supplementary food. But such ponds
take up more space than intensive farms, at a greater cost to wetlands
and coastal ecosystems. In the Philippines, the value of mangrove
forests is now becoming recognized thanks to the tireless campaigning
of scientist and activist Jurgenne Primavera. She says, based on
decades of research, that shrimp ponds should not exceed a quarter
of the area of mangrove forest if we are to preserve the ecological
function of coasts. Her work has led efforts to restore forests and
move ponds behind sheltering buffers of trees, and she was hailed a
hero of the environment by Time magazine in 2008. 32 (Shellfish and
seaweeds can be also be cultured in natural mangrove and salt- marsh
channels.) At the other end of the spectrum, experimental farms in
Belize have gone for high- technology, superintensive methods. There
shrimps are raised under covered raceways and fed on biofloc, clumps
of microbes formed around starch grains and sprinkled into the water.
This reduces the need for expensive feed and helps recycle nutrients
from shrimp excreta, which reduces sludge production.
We may need to say good- bye to the succulent predators favored
by Western consumers and rich Asians alike. Marine aquaculture will
have to learn instead from the ancient art of carp polyculture practiced
in the freshwater ponds and rice paddies of Asia. We need to
find species that grow well together so that one will clean up the
waste produced by another. Some fish eat seaweed or detritus and can
be raised more sustainably than those that crave fish flesh. Mullet
grub around on the seabed for their food and might reduce pollution
problems if farmed together with more predatory fish. Likewise, sea
cucumbers are considered a delicacy throughout much of Southeast
Asia and have been seriously overfished in the wild. These animals are
a bit like vacuum cleaners with a hole at one end where detritus goes
in and a bum at the other where something that looks nearly identical
comes out. Years ago, before I was aware of seafood problems, I tasted
sea cucumber soup. I have to admit I’m no connoisseur and it felt a
bit like chewing on a rubber band. But the Chinese and Japanese love
sea cucumbers and it could make sense to grow them beneath pens of
fish to help recycle their waste.

The industry will need to work hard to raise standards and improve
sustainability. I have met many fish farmers who are committed to
doing just that. With their energy and enthusiasm, aquaculture could
indeed help feed the world. But there are challenges ahead. Growing
shellfish has always been touted as one of the most environmentally
friendly ways to produce seafood. Mussels, clams, and scallops feed on
plankton and other organic matter filtered from the water around
them. They don’t need to be fed wild-caught fish and can improve
water quality. But there is a catch. They depend on their carbonate
shells, and life is going to get much tougher for them, and would-be
aquaculturists, as the seas become more acidic. If you are fond of mussels
and scallops, you may want to think hard about what we can do to
reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

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