WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • SEPTEMBER 2013 19 paddies, feeding on periphyton, decaying plant material and insects, or fish integrated with the farming of terrestrial animals, such as chicken, ducks and pigs, using wastes and by-products as direct and indirect food sources. Business aquaculture is a much more recent phenomenon. It was pioneered by the Japanese in the 1960s, and taken up later and further developed in Europe, USA, and Australia, in fact everywhere today, even in Asia. The main principle is to engage in the farming of species with high market value following capital-intensive business models. These modern aquaculture industries became feasible from new insights into the biology and life cycle of target organisms, for example, how parental stock could be induced to mature, or how the development of hatchery techniques allow the production of mass quantities of fry in hatcheries, fingerlings that can be stocked in high-density grow-out systems. Similar to the analogous plant and animal farming practices on land, business aquaculture is always practiced as a monoculture. Some typical examples include: seaweed production was 21 million mt in 2011, worth US$ 5.5 billion (FAO 2013, Fig. 2) By quantity, Asia and the Pacific are responsible for nearly 90 percent of the production but, when expressed by value, Europe and Latin America make up 20 percent because their aquaculture products fetch higher market prices (Fig. 3). Food Aquaculture and Business Aquaculture Aquaculture practices can be classified under two categories: “food aquaculture,” as practiced for millennia in Asia, and “business aquaculture,” the more recent developments that have resulted in new practices with different systems and species (Fig. 4). Food aquaculture is exemplified by the traditional farming of freshwater fish in ponds in Asia. This food security approach is mainly to meet the farmer’s personal needs or for catering to very local markets. Until today this pond production practice is very important because it provides close to 15 million mt annually in China alone. Typical for this traditional food aquaculture is the integrated approach: farming of aquatic species in combination with other food production practices. Examples include fish and prawns in the ditches of rice (CONTINUED ON PAGE 18) TOP LEFT & RIGHT, FIGURE 3. Aquaculture production per region (courtesy Rohana Subasinghe, FAO-Rome, 2013). MIDDLE, FIGURE 4. Food aquaculture versus business aquaculture. BOTTOM, FIGURE 5. World salmon production (courtesy Yves Harache, 2010).
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