WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017 11 efficiently enough to actually make a profit is a challenge. In the medium term, the challenges for aquaculture will be to find sustainable way to prevent and combat diseases, particularly in shrimp culture, to improve feed in some areas of the world, and to find optimum water quality levels in term of water aeration (while some farmers aerate too much, other farmers aerate too little), and to improve the environmental management and resources used in farms. In the long term, aquaculture will have to stop using high amount of fishmeal, otherwise semi-intensive and intensive aquaculture will go out of business. Scientists have proven that fishmeal could significantly be reduced and even eliminated from some fish diets without compromising fish growth. However, no one from the industry (fishmeal producers, feed produced and fish farmers) is willing to adopt these findings and make the change, probably because fishmeal represents a big market. But this fishmeal issue has to be solved because the use of this ingredient represents one of the most important environmental problems associated with aquaculture. Rodrigue Yossa: What does the future of aquaculture look like in your region? Claude Boyd: In the southeast USA, channel catfish farming is not doing well and the current production is about 50 percent of what it was 10 years ago. Channel catfish farming has not been promoted as it should have been. The farmers never aggressively tried to sell their products overseas as an export product and they were not innovative enough to promote catfish in the US. For instance, some years ago, I was at a conference in Ecuador and a speaker showed 30 different tilapia products for the market. In U.S. catfish, it is difficult to find more than three types of products in the market. In my region aquaculture production has stabilized and is no longer declining. Rodrigue Yossa: What does the future of aquaculture look like in the world? Claude Boyd: It looks very good in Asia and pretty good in Central and South America, where aquaculture is expending every year. Regarding Africa, I do not know that much about aquaculture development there, but I believe that there is potential. Rodrigue Yossa: What do you think about professional certification of aquaculturists? Claude Boyd: The America Fisheries Society certifies Fisheries Biologists, but there is currently no certification dedicated to aquaculture specialists, to my knowledge. Certification would be a really good thing, especially for those who work directly in the aquaculture industry. There should be some way to verify that somebody who is hired to work in the industry has some level of expertise. The certification of aquaculture professionals will therefore be important in this regard. Rodrigue Yossa: What would be the steps towards the professionalization of aquaculturists? Claude Boyd: Certifying people at the university level would be complex because academics are usually very good in a specific area of aquaculture but are not that good in other aspects of aquaculture. This certification should be given by a third party. When we started developing aquaculture certification programs for ecolabeling, the first step was to look at other industries and see how they certified their products. In the case of aquaculture, see how it works in other professional fields such as engineering, fisheries, and particularly agronomy, and then adapt that to aquaculture reality and set sustainable aquaculture standards for professional certification. This would involve the participation of aquaculture academics, aquaculture industry, civil society, and government agencies. Rodrigue Yossa: What would you have done differently if you had to restart your career in aquaculture? Claude Boyd: I always wanted to be a geologist, but back then people of the Mississippi State University told me that they had all the geologists that they needed, and that I would not be able to get a job. That was true at that time, but it would not necessarily be true today. So, I love what I have achieved in aquaculture so far, but if had to do it all over again, I would be a geologist, in spite of what the geology professors told me in 1956. Rodrigue Yossa: What advice would you give to young aquaculturists? Claude Boyd: Aquaculture students should have a good background in quantitative mathematics, physics, chemistry, agronomy, in addition to biology. Aquaculture, like other kinds of production systems, requires a quantitative approach. Those trained only in biology tend to view the world qualitatively. Graduates in aquaculture with a B.Sc. should go to graduate school, because that is needed nowadays to get a decent job, at least in the US. I would not advise anyone in the US to get into aquaculture if he/she is not planning to get a graduate degree. NEW BOOK IN THE WAS ONLINE STORE Aquaculture: Will it rise to its potential to feed the world? By George S. Lockwood. Aquaculture is the most environmentally sustainable means to feed the population boom that threatens the planet. Will government allow it to do this critically important job? Paperback 199 pages. ISBN: 9781366393340
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