reLAKSation 455
The Fundamentals: "There is nothing inherently unsustainable with aquaculture as long as the producers choose to operate on a sustainable basis" so Professor Frank Asche told the audience at last week’s Aquavision conference. What Professor Asche appears to be saying is that aquaculture must be considered sustainable if fish are farmed in a sustainable way! This is like saying that a wall is blue if it’s painted blue.
There is no doubt that sustainability is the buzz word of the aquaculture industry. The problem is that no-one really knows what it means or how it applies to aquaculture. It is just something that the industry now aspires to otherwise there is a concern that if the aquaculture industry cannot demonstrate its sustainable credentials, it could be excluded from the mainstream food supply.
What the aquaculture industry has failed to realise is the essential truth that aquaculture is fundamentally sustainable.
The problem for the aquaculture industry is that once they talk about sustainability, no-one now knows where to draw the line. Every single action or process is examined including those that relate to any business, not just aquaculture. Unfortunately, the sustainability of every other business is not being scrutinised like aquaculture is. This is because aquaculture produce shares the same retail counters as the real target for sustainable scrutiny – wild caught fish.
Wild catch fisheries are the last example of hunter-gathering by man. In every other area of food supply, we have turned to farming. Whilst consumers are being told to select sustainably caught fish, the same cannot be said of other proteins. This is because farming is fundamentally sustainable. Wild catch fisheries are not. Fisheries are finite sources which are prone to collapse through excessive fishing pressure. The idea of sustainable fisheries is that the amount of fish harvested does not threaten the ability of the fishery to reproduce itself. Whether this can be really measured remains to be seen.
What is clear is that world fish stocks, even when judged to be sustainable, cannot meet world demand for fish and seafood. This s why we need to turn to farming to guarantee future supplies of fish. It is only through aquaculture that we can produce the fish we need. In addition, every fish that is produced by aquaculture is one less fish that needs to be caught from the sea.
Regrettably, there is a small but vocal lobby that argues that wild catch fish must be sustainable but argues even more that aquaculture is neither sustainable nor the answer. Recently, The Times newspaper featured a number of stories about sustainable fish. One that caught our eye was written by environmental food writer Alex Renton. His article began that if it wasn’t for cod, consumers would be eating frozen, cheap, ugly, bland chemical-filled, tropical river fish with their chips. He then added that they are.
Now, we at Callander McDowell may not be the world’s experts on sustainability but we don’t understand why being an ugly fish would make it unsustainable? In the past, Mr Renton has written about the collapse of cod stocks and how we should turn to other species. Unfortunately, Mr Renton seems to prefer to eat cod and is quick to denigrate the alternatives (and not just those that are farmed).
Mr Renton writes that his local chippie (more a restaurant than a chippie) the Tail End in Edinburgh would never sell pangasius because they say it tastes like mud because that’s what they live in. Mr Renton continues that his chippie is not far wrong and that when he was in South East Asia he saw family toilets placed ‘deliberately’ right over fish ponds.
Mr Renton wants to encourage the consumption of sustainable fish (as long as it is to his taste and not cheap and nasty) but when he sees an example of the most sustainable fish production in the world, he is quick to be disparaging.
Extensive warmwater pond culture of fish such as pangasius, carp and tilapia is the model for sustainable aquaculture. It is a fantastic system for producing edible fish protein from waste. It actually has more in common with agriculture than the types of aquaculture commonly practiced in the West. However, it is not the type of aquaculture that produces the pangasius sold in the Western markets where volume is a prerequisite. It is more akin to subsistence farming.
In extensive pond culture, the fish are actually a by-product. The real crop is the zooplankton that grows in the water, fuelled by the nutrient rich fertilisers applied to the pond. These can be of animal, or as Mr Renton observed, human origin. Whichever, they get broken down and begin the food chain which eventually leads to the fish. It is no different to the muck spreading that is a common feature of UK arable farm life.
And while Mr Renton finds pangasius disgusting, awarding it just 9/30 in a taste test that he conducted (compared with 27/30 for cod), it seems that plenty of consumers do like it. Mr Renton might find that he has little choice. The owners of his ‘excellent’ chippie are packing up shop and moving to St Andrews. Instead, we would recommend the lesser known Newington Fish Bar in South Clerk Street, the weekly sustainable special currently being pangasius (last week MSC Alaskan pollock). However, Mr Renton is unlikely to make the effort to cross Edinburgh, much as he seems unable to make the effort to understand sustainable fish production.
Beth and Sarah: Greenpeace in Canada has released its second annual ranking of Canadian supermarkets in relation to their sustainable seafood sourcing policies. Seafood News.com says that this is an attempt to take credit for improvements in the way that supermarkets source their seafood. This is because most supermarkets have now issued some policy on sustainable seafood but without reference to Greenpeace. Seafood News.com says that having removed some of the most threatened species from their fish counters, Greenpeace are now asking supermarkets to stop selling some fish and seafood that is most popular with consumers. These are fish that appear on the Greenpeace red list of fifteen species. Two of these are farmed Atlantic salmon and Atlantic scallops.
It is no surprise that salmon is on the Greenpeace red list. After all, it is the top of the list of most hated fish by most environmental groups. There are three reasons listed for its inclusion, pollution, disease and feed. Of course, pollution of the seas is the fault of farmed salmon. The fact that fish naturally defecate in the sea seems largely irrelevant. It is also well-known that salmon farming is responsible for the decline of wild salmon populations, even those that are located hundreds of miles from any salmon farm. Finally, farming carnivorous fish like salmon impacts on wild fish populations even though salmon naturally feed on small fish in the wild. Forty per cent of fishmeal production is currently used in terrestrial agriculture but this is not an issue because pigs and poultry don’t naturally feed on fish. It’s easier to pillory the salmon industry. Equally, we wouldn’t want to deprive our pet cats of all that goodness that comes from fish in pet food.
Whilst farmed salmon is not an unexpected target for environmental groups, Seafood News.com were surprised that Canadian stores were being asked to stop selling Atlantic scallops. They say that is laughable since as of March this year, Atlantic scallops caught off the Canadian East coast have been certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. No supermarket is going to stop selling MSC certified fish and seafood simply because Greenpeace say it is unsustainable.
The authors of the Greenpeace report – ‘Taking Stock’ write that the fish and seafood that appear on the red list, whilst popular with consumers, are extremely harmful to the overall health of the oceans ecosystems. How can Atlantic scallops be considered so harmful to the ocean and yet have been certified as sustainable by the MSC? Clearly Greenpeace are working to a different agenda to everyone else.
In the case of farmed salmon, there has been so much negative publicity over the years that it is now ingrained in the environmentalists psyche. Of course, in the interests of fairness, it would be hoped that the authors of this report are experienced marine specialists who have in-depth knowledge of the issues and haven’t simply regurgitated the same old negativity.
The authors of the report ‘Taking Stock’ are listed as Beth Hunter and Sarah King, names that are not familiar to us but then this is a report written in Canada about Canadian supermarkets. However, as Beth and Sarah are so instrumental in trying to change what consumers eat, so little is known about them.
Beth, it seems, is a lifelong environmentalist having at the age of 10 sold cookies to raise the funds for the WWF (Does she know that the WWF are involved in a programme which will eventually certify farmed salmon as sustainable). Beth went on to study for a Liberal Arts degree at Concordia University where she became interested in food security and social justice. Between 1996 and 2002, Beth worked on a programme of community supported agriculture before travelling to Lebanon to work on a Master’s thesis in Rural Economics. In 2007, Beth returned to Montreal and took a job as Oceans Campaigner with Greenpeace whilst continuing to finish her thesis.
Sarah King, based in Vancouver, studied Geography at McGill University and the studied for a Masters in Environmental Science at Ryerson University. Since 2008, Sarah has worked as an Oceans Campaigner for Greenpeace.
Sarah has been with Greenpeace for about 2 years and Beth, three. This doesn’t seem to have been very long to have become experts (although Sarah’s thesis was on the cumulative environmental impacts on salmon mariculture in SW NB.) on deciding what consumers in Canada can and cannot eat.
Of course this isn’t of any surprise. It doesn’t seem necessary to have any qualifications to blame aquaculture for all or any of society’s ills.