New report about aquaculture is old news
With the recent announcement by the US Obama administration giving a green light to the devlopment of off-shore aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico, a renewed interest in aquaculture has emerged within world media circles. The latest issue making news is the well known and previously published information confirming that half of the world's seafood now comes from aquaculture. The United Nation's FAO has made this clear for some time now.
In the latest version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a report is published that confirms this fact. "Aquaculture is set to reach a landmark in 2009, supplying half of the total fish and shellfish for human consumption", states the authors, who were led by Rosamond L. Naylor, a professor of environmental Earth system science at the Stanford University and director of the Stanford Program on Food Security and the Environment.
Between 1995 and 2007, global production of farmed fish nearly tripled in volume, in part because of rising consumer demand for long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. Fish high in oil, like farmed or wild salmon, contain high amounts of these omega-3's, whiach are effective in reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, according to the National Institutes of Health.
While these assertions are certainly accurate, the report also includes erroneous statements like "It can take up to five ponds of wild fish to produce one pound of (farmed) salmon" and "One way to make salmon farming more environmentally sustainable is to simply lower the amount of fish oil in the salmon's diet". These might have been an accurate statements years ago, but today salmon feed manufacturers are actually getting closer to a 1 to 1 ratio, without compromising the health-promoting qualities of the farmed salmon. And salmon feed manufacturers gathered during the AquaNor conference in Norway last month did not see a shortage of raw materials as a hindrance to the industry's further growth, and thus sustainability. The substitution of fish oil and fish meal made from wild-caught fish like Chilean anchovetas with raw materials from the fish processing industry is part of the explanation, as is the increased use of feed ingredients of an agriculture origin.
The authors of the report would also have been wise to include the fact that cultured species like salmon convert fish oil and fish meal into edible protein for human consumption much more efficiently than the other species of livestock that would be fed these raw materials were they not used for aquaculture.
