Seafood guide questioned

Odd Grydeland

Opinion

Many so-called “guides to sustainable seafood” such as the one produced by the Monterey Bay Aquarium are often misleading and non-constructive when it comes to promoting good human health. Take for example the recommendation to “avoid” farmed Atlantic salmon from British Columbia. There is no scientific justification for this recommendation, whether it comes to issues of raw materials for fish food, fish escapes, disease interaction or waste from the region’s farms. In addition, by telling consumers not to buy this product, organizations such as the David Suzuki Foundation is depriving people of a source of reasonably priced, highly nutritious and health-promoting food product.

Another reason to buy more seafood and to ignore some of the advice provided by environmental groups is professed by a professor at the University of Washington, as Tim Hunter of the Fairfax NZ News explains;

Professor Ray Hilborn has a question for the marine conservation lobby: If eating most fish is bad, is it better to eat beef, chicken or pork? It's a rhetorical question. "I think the answer is pretty clearly no," he says. The American fisheries scientist – he teaches resource management and conservation at the University of Washington – became interested in the wider environmental cost of food production two years ago. "A friend in Africa who's the head of conservation programmes for the Frankfurt zoo asked me `should I stop eating fish?', and I'd never really thought about the tradeoffs before."Almost everybody focuses on rainforest or marine and doesn't look at the connections." Those connections form part of a report Hilborn is presenting at seminars in New Zealand this week.

Titled "The Environmental Cost of New Zealand Food Production", it assembles information on various factors such as greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, erosion, loss of biodiversity and eutrophication – the amount of nutrients released into the air, water or soil. The conclusions come in several categories. Per serving, for example, the species of wild fish caught most fuel-efficiently are barracouta and southern blue whiting, but both take more energy than a serving of beef or dairy protein. Dairying produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than beef farming, but more than most fisheries.

On biodiversity, says Hilborn, the contrasts become extreme. Since New Zealand dairy and meat production uses mostly non-native forage, the reduction in plant biodiversity is almost total in land converted to pasture. Wild fisheries, meanwhile, rely on a naturally functioning ecosystem. This fact is often lost on marine conservationists concerned about bycatch, for example, says Hilborn. "The species that attract the most attention in New Zealand – dolphins, sealions etc ... you've always got to go back to the comparison with agriculture. Those species are still there in marine ecosystems, but in agriculture we essentially plough the place down and turn it into something else."

Hilborn's tour follows closely on the heels of a report published this month by Forest & Bird called the Best Fish Guide, which aims to advise on which fish are the most sustainably caught. Of 74 species rated, it recommended consumers avoid 50 and had concerns about the other 24. None were rated sustainable.

The timing was coincidence, says Hilborn. And although his time spent preparing the report was paid for by the fishing industry through the Seafood Industry Council, funding for his work comes from a wide variety of sources. "Most of my money comes from environmental foundations."

But it's clear he finds aspects of Forest & Bird's approach narrow and unscientific. "They basically look at the abundance of the stock and they then look at bycatch and things like that. It's pretty clear how they do it, but to some extent those guys are just clueless. "The idea that hoki were in danger because they were going down in abundance ... they just obviously don't understand population dynamics."

The guide's author, Katrina Subedar, said she had been in her role only since August and was unfamiliar with Hilborn's work, but said the guide was not saying Kiwis shouldn't eat wild-caught fish. "We encourage New Zealanders to eat seafood and to continue to support that industry. It's just about making the right decisions on which species to eat based on our ecological assessment." Hilborn's report appeared to be selective in which environmental impacts it assessed, she said. "In my view this report is a little bit cheeky. From our perspective it's not giving a true reflection of the situation."

Hilborn has a problem with that. "If you look at their list and take the species in their green section, they constitute a couple of per cent of New Zealand's fisheries landings. And this is pretty typical – if you take these marine conservation agendas by themselves and say `what should you eat?', they essentially say you should not eat almost all the fish in the world. "So my question to them is `OK, are we better off if people then go out and eat beef, chicken and pork?', and I think the answer is pretty clearly no. "Yes, there are environmental costs in fishing, but the alternatives are also costly. Even the greenest of (agricultural, land-based livestock- ed. note) farms destroys the ecosystem that existed before."