Sustainable Aquaculture: Protecting Our Oceans and Feeding the World

The sustainability of aquaculture will not be a choice for the future, but a necessity. Aquaculture has grown from an alternative means of producing marine and freshwater plants and animals to an integral part of the existing food supply and, in fact, the most promising means of supplying the protein that the world will require to feed its growing population. Over the last 30 years the world has seen changes in fishing technologies/ effort that have facilitated our ability to extract fish and other aquatic organisms from the sea, lakes, and rivers at a rate never before experienced. As the world population has continued to increase so has the demand for aquatic protein and therefore our ability to sell ‘all that we can catch’, or extract from these aquatic environments. As we continued to extract at a rate greater than is biologically sustainable, we are faced with a diminished resource base and overfished species. Embracing terms such as maximum sustainable yield, countries began to implement quotas on fishing effort and gear and/or restrictions to entry. There were warning signs that the ‘supply’ was being ‘fished out’. Today, of all the known commercial species being fished, only 15 percent are at a level that will allow for additional harvesting. This is not sufficient to keep up with demand. In fact, there has been little ‘new’ fish biomass extracted from our oceans since the 1980s. In terms of global production volume, that of farmed fish and aquatic plants combined surpassed that of capture fisheries in 2013. In terms of food supply, aquaculture provided more fish than capture fisheries for the first time in 2014. By 2014, a total of 580 species and/or species groups were farmed around the world.1 In 2014, 73.8 million tonnes of aquatic animals were harvested from aquaculture (Table 1).2