WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • SEPTEMBER 2014 21 not always recognize. This response can serve as a positive example of leadership to other farmed animal production sectors such as poultry, pork and beef. It also represents a significant opportunity for those animal production sectors to address the relevant issues associated with their environmental and social impacts. Some stakeholders in the aquaculture world reject a market flooded with certification programs as unconstructive. However, there are many positive aspects to this direction. As mentioned previously, no land-based food production industries have undergone such intense and focused scrutiny as has aquaculture. Aquaculture is the only center-plate protein production system with a referenced gold standard addressing environmental and social impacts. Aquaculture also has several alternative standards that are relevant and can be used in a stepwise, phased approach to achieve a gold standard over time by showing continuous improvement, thereby demonstrating the responsible path to sustainability. Aquaculture can address sustainability broadly by using existing certification systems to demonstrate environmentally and socially responsible production. In 2006, the WWF embarked on a unique and ambitious initiative to create environmental and social standards for nine commodity species of farmed seafood. This global initiative was called the Aquaculture Dialogues. http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_ do/footprint/agriculture/shrimp/aquaculture_dialogues_/ . Over eight years and almost seven million US dollars were invested. The Dialogues involved more than 2,200 multi-stakeholder participants successfully to create standards that the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC; asc-aqua.org) now uses to assess and certify farming practices. These are the first aquaculture standards to be created and managed in compliance with the stringent guidelines of the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling (ISEAL) Alliance, an organization dedicated to credible process. Many argued against and criticized the Aquaculture Dialogues for taking too long and requiring great expense to develop. However, those critics fail to understand that the value stocks of small pelagic fish used to make fishmeal and fish oil as a component of feed (Hall et al. 2011). This is the most obvious dependence on natural resource sustainability for the success of fed aquaculture, but like other food systems, water quality, climatic stability, soil vitality and other environmental resources must be managed better by humans to meet our future needs in a way that allows the true renewable capacity of the Earth’s resources to be used responsibly. Aquaculture must unify to successfully compete with other center-plate protein sources such as beef, poultry and pork. In 2011, global farmed fish did in fact, surpass beef production and has maintained that lead. It is easy to state the obvious: we must double food production while simultaneously reducing by half the environmental/social impacts of any food production system. If we are already consuming 1.5 times the renewable resources of planet Earth (WWF 2012) and are required to double food production in the next 36 years to meet future demands, we need to produce more with less. This is the mantra of tomorrow; easy to say, difficult to do, but very possible to achieve. Aquaculture is ideally poised to assume a leadership role in the efficient use of resources to produce high-quality and nutritious protein. Although the following tables and graphs show values for salmon, it is important to emphasize that over 40 percent of aquaculture represents low trophic level carp production. Over the last two decades considerable attention has been given to addressing the environmental and social impacts of aquaculture. Public perceptions should not be discredited. The increased scrutiny of the effects of aquaculture on constrained natural and common societal resources is justified. One way the aquaculture industry has addressed this is the development of environmental standards and third-party certification systems. If we consider aquaculture standards with relevant environmental, food safety, social and animal welfare categories, there are now more than 30 different options. The reaction of many sectors of aquaculture to criticism, of creating environmental and social standards that can independently demonstrate a compliant farm’s environmental performance, is an asset that people working in aquaculture do (CONTINUED ON PAGE 22) FIGURE 3. Comparison of several key performance indicators between center-plate protein production sectors. (For feed conversion, from Skretting internal data; for irrigation water, from Welch et al. 2010). TABLE 1. Comparison of several key performance indicators between center-plate protein production sectors (from Bjorki 2002). Atlantic Salmon Pig Chicken Lamb Harvest yield (%) 86 72.5 65.6 46.9 Edible yield (%) 68.3 52.1 46.1 38.2 FCRc 1.15 2.63 1.79 6.3 Energy retention (%) 23 14 10 5 Protein retention (%) 31 18 21 5
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