WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • DECEMBER 17 (CONTINUED ON PAGE 18) TABLE 2. Topics related to responsible aquaculture that are included in the list of 62 topics for abstracts submitted to Aquaculture America 2014. Animal welfare Environment, biodiversity and climate change Aquacultural food safety programs, inspections Fish meal and oil extension and audits Policy and regulations Aquaculture standards and certification Quality assurance and HACCP Best management practices Sustainable development of aquaculture Development, welfare, and poverty alleviation Water quality and effluents Environment, biodiversity and climate change An obvious effect of the responsible aquaculture movement is the influence that it has had on aquaculture conferences. A responsible aquaculture theme often is indicated in bold print on brochures that promote conferences. Moreover, nearly all major aquaculture conferences now have sessions on one or more aspects of responsible aquaculture. For example, Aquaculture America 2014 asks contributors of abstracts to select a topic that best describes the content of their submission from a list of 62 topics. The list contained 12 topics directly related to responsible aquaculture (Table 2). There also were several other topics indirectly related to sustainable aquaculture. Universities have installed courses or amended existing courses to cover issues related to aquaculture, resource use, and the environment. It also is not uncommon for graduate students in aquaculture to conduct their masters or doctoral research projects on those topics. The new generation of aquaculture professionals should be more attuned to the responsible aquaculture movement than their predecessors. Some high schools are including information about aquaculture in their curricula, and this can lead to a public that is better informed about aquaculture. Aquaculture in the Context of Global Food Production Despite the furor that has been raised about aquaculture, it is a rather small endeavor relative to other food production sectors. Aquaculture accounts for about 0.6 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. Its current annual production of about 60 million metric tons is dwarfed by nearly 9 billion t of agricultural production — yet aquaculture supplies about 3.6 percent of the world’s animal protein for human consumption. Water use, land use, fuel use, fertilizer and feed use, release of nitrogen phosphorus, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and other pollutants, and most other resource use and environmental effects of aquaculture are rather small — less than 1 to 2 percent of most total uses or negative effects on a global scale (Boyd and McNevin, in preparation). The main impact of aquaculture on world resources is its role in fishmeal and fish oil use — about 60 percent of fish meal and 80 percent of fish oil are included in aquaculture feeds even though aquaculture feeds represent only 3.6 percent of all animal feeds. The fishmeal and fish oil issue has been a major concern of the eNGOs (Naylor et al. 2000), but it also represents a possible barrier to the future growth of aquaculture. At the current inclusion rates of fish meal and fish oil in aquaculture feeds, there will not be enough of this resource to allow aquaculture production to reach the quantities needed in future years. The eNGOs have no doubt been a factor in encouraging the aquaculture feed industry to increase its ongoing efforts to find substitutes for marine fishmeal and fish oil. Environmental perturbations by aquaculture are mostly limited to local losses in biodiversity caused by land use changes, water pollution, etc. Compared to agriculture, the global effect on biodiversity is rather minor, because the land area occupied by aquaculture facilities is only about 0.5 percent of the area used by agriculture. Nevertheless, negative impacts should not be excused because they tend to be minor on a global scale, and aquaculture, like any other aspect of goods and service production, should be conducted responsibly. The problem is that a large proportion of the negative impacts of aquaculture occur in Asia as a result of the culture of species for national markets in which consumers have little interest in the environmental effects of a product. FIGURE 4. Overall view of tilapia cages at Castanhão Reservoir, Nova Jaguaribara, Ceará, Brazil. Fish cages are appropriately installed in the reservoir allowing enough space for water circulation. In addition, the floating shed was installed to properly store fish feed and other equipment. Photo: João Manoel Cordeiro Alves.
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