2 March 2012 Editor’s note — Freezing the footprint of aquafood Jason Clay is well-known to many in WAS. He was the plenary speaker at the triennial conference in 2007 and has been actively engaged with the Society and a broad spectrum of stakeholders to improve the environmental performance of aquaculture. Jason has been involved with the development of aquaculture Best Management Practices (although he prefers the adjective “better”) and environmental certification programs, especially with his long-term employer, the World Wildlife Federation, where he is now a Vice-President of Market Transformation. Last year, Jason authored an article published in Science (475:287-289) titled “Freezing the Footprint of Food,” which is premised on the necessity of doing more with less as an approach to feed 2-3 billion more people (than the 9 billion already here) by 2050. Jason calls for a freeze on inputs to agriculture and offers a suggestions ranging from low-hanging fruit to long-term structural change. In his article, Jason identifies eight strategies—what he calls “food wedges”—to achieve the freeze. The strategies are discussed broadly with respect to global agriculture and he does not single out aquaculture. Nonetheless, some strategies have relevance to aquaculture and these are discussed here. At the top of the list is genetic improvement. The combination of traditional selection techniques, aided by molecular markers, and a range of modern biotechnologies offers the promise of improved performance, particularly in growth rate, feed conversion, and disease resistance. Broadly speaking and with some notable exceptions, aquaculture lags far behind other forms of animal agriculture when it comes to genetic improvement. Given the generally superior growth performance in terms of nutrient and energy conversion of feeds by aquatic animals as compared to terrestrial livestock, freezing the footprint of food can be aided by shifting resources for breeding programs from poultry, swine, and cattle to fish and shrimp. Better practices are identified as another food wedge in Jason’s article. He argues for raising the level of the lowest-performing producers because the scope for increasing their productivity and income is greatest and they make a disproportionately large contribution to environmental impacts. He calls for new thinking about ways to transmit information to farmers. Weak governments, especially in lesser developed countries, means that traditional extension services are ineffective. Using master farmers or hatchery owners to deliver better practices to low-performing producers might be a more effective approach. Ecolabeling programs that have better practices at their core could also provide an incentive for more producers to improve practices and performance. The proliferation of such programs (Continued on page 5) 64 Channel catfish Ictalurus punctatus growth in single and multiple-batch production William A. Wurts 67 Specific pathogen free shrimps: Their scope in aquaculture Debtanu Barman, Vikash Kumar, Suvra Roy and Sagar C Mandal Society 2 Editor’s Note — Freezing the footprint of aquafood 3 President’s column 3 Aquaculture and Fisheries Biotechnology: Genetics Approaches, 2nd Edition 4 WAS Board adopts and operationalizes a new strategic plan Graham C. Mair 6 U.S. Aquaculture Society Chapter Update 7 Asian Pacific Chapter Update 7 Korean Chapter Update 66 Calendar 68 Advertisers’ Index 72 Membership Application Contents (continued) Dr. Stickney takes full responsibility for the misspelling of Nepal on the cover and photo credit in the December 2010 issue of World Aquaculture and expresses his regret for missing the error during review of the proof.” Erratum
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