8 MARCH 2015 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WAS.ORG percent) for all categories of technical information were from the United States with the remainder (37 percent) representing 90 other countries. As expected with a new and emerging technology, new visitors (83 percent) far outnumbered those returning (17 percent). In the ensuing 20 years, as aquaculture has grown and Internet access has become more extensive and commonplace around the world, the total number and distribution of visitors to the WAS employment pages has also changed. Returning visitors for job-related information (64 percent) on average outnumber new visitors (36 percent) by almost a 2:1 ratio. International usage has grown to represent more than half (55 percent) of visitor traffic and the number of countries represented (174) has almost doubled. Increasing international use of the employment service job, resume and links databases is expected to continue, and is facilitated by the WAS policy to make online job information available not only to members, but to all without cost as a service to the global aquaculture community. As the WAS Employment Service enters into its 31st year and moves forward, its fundamental goal remains the same as when it started, to serve as a clearinghouse for up-to-date aquaculture job and career information. Since the beginning of online job services with the AquaNIC-WAS databases in 1994, other commercial and open (free) online employment resources have become plentiful. A Google search returning over 11 million links presents too much information for most people to manage in a timely and effective manner. The WAS Employment Service website aims to provide some focus by maintaining a current list of jobs and job candidates, while also highlighting the best of the many other links to online employment and career resources in aquaculture, fisheries and the aquatic sciences. Other longer-term goals include 1) increasing WAS member access to and utilization of employment information by continuing to educate new and current student, professional members and employers about the website and range of services offered, 2) continuing to work with and support WAS student affairs and career development efforts with the U.S. Aquaculture Society and the other WAS regional chapters, and 3) identifying additional regional employment links to better serve members in the AsianPacific, Latin American and Caribbean and Korean Chapters. Notes John Ewart (ewart@udel.edu) is an aquaculture and fisheries extension specialist for the Delaware Sea Grant program. He started and continues to manage employment services for WAS. References Swann, D.L. and M. Einstein. 2000. User analysis and future directions of the web-based Aquaculture Network Information Center. Journal of Extension 38(5). www.joe.org/ joe/2000october/iw2.php WAS Employment, continued from page 6 I enjoyed your editorial on Aquaculture and Food Security in the December issue of World Aquaculture. Given its increasing importance, I think it is right that our industry should now begin to look at itself in terms of global food security concerns. However, now that we’re starting to talk about it in this way, rather than mostly as a supplement to wild fish supplies, I wonder if we shouldn’t broaden the vision to emphasize farming of seaweeds (macroalgae) as well as fish and other animals. The great majority of the human diet derives from plants. Animal products contribute only 15 percent, of which 64 percent is milk and eggs. If aquaculture aspires to play a major role in future world food security, and it should, it will, like agriculture, have to be based mostly on production of vegetable matter (see www.marineagronomy.org). You cite FAO data on current levels of hunger and malnutrition in the world, but do not mention FAO’s projection of there being 2 billion more people here by 2050 and that to feed them and to accommodate the still unmet needs of those who are already here we will need to produce 70 percent more food than we do today. That means about 5 billion t/yr more food, which puts aquaculture’s present production of 66.6 million t/yr of food fish in perspective and points to the need for us to broaden our vision and think about the future development of our industry in a different way. In fact, as our industry has gained experience of farming food fish at sea in recent years, I see this as the next stage in its evolution. Already over 20 million t/yr of seaweed are produced by Letter to the Editor farming, at least 10× more than is harvested from the wild. Why couldn’t we produce much more than that? There’s much more space available at sea than there is on land and farming seaweeds requires no freshwater for irrigation, the lack of which constrains agricultural expansion in many countries. Seaweed production would also remove CO2 from seawater and so help to reduce ocean acidification, and it could also help to remove nutrients in coastal waters where terrestrial runoff causes dead zones. Farming and processing of a volume of seaweeds that would contribute significantly to our future food needs would also create lots of new business opportunities and many thousands, if not millions of jobs. To make it a reality, the challenge is to change our mindset and that of the markets we supply, so that ‘sea vegetables’ become as much a part of our everyday diet as terrestrial vegetables are now. This is an area in which Ocean Approved in Maine (www. oceanapproved.com) is showing the way and suggests there is as much opportunity in finding new ways to process, cook and serve seaweeds as there is in growing them in the first place. In fact, the two are vitally interlinked. If, as you conclude in your editorial, “Food security goals and strategies need to be an integral and explicit part of policies and governance of the aquaculture sector,” I wonder if this is an aspect of our industry where WAS and World Aquaculture could now take the lead and promote active discussion on the subject. — John Forster, Forster Consulting Inc., Port Angeles, WA
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