World Aquaculture Magazine - June 2021

WWW.WA S .ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • JUNE 2021 23 announce a new, usually large- scale aquaculture development planned for a community near us, especially if we live on the world’s freshwater or marine coasts. Academics routinely state in the first line of abstracts on many papers (choosing just one recent one here, Love et al. 2020), that “Aquaculture now produces nearly half of the seafood consumed globally.” These stories usually lead with the background to the local aquaculture developments that: • Because of the need for food for a growing world population, we need aquaculture in your place and more so as the world’s fisheries, and those locally, have collapsed; and by implication capture fisheries are unsustainable with the seas being plied and preyed upon by a dying generation employing ancient technologies. So, get on board, you misinformed! While you were eating your meat, there’s been a huge growth of aquaculture as the world’s fastest growing form of food production; and, • Aquaculture has been growing so fast, the world (meaning you) now get half of its “fish” from aquaculture. Maps often are attached to these stories showing dots of aquaculture farms scattered across your coast, proof at a glance of aquaculture’s massive proliferation in your region. These pronouncements are usually followed by statements or implications that it is urgent/vital to give this proliferation more space. The world needs more food so get with the program! The regular responses we hear from the public (and we’re coastal publics too) are: “What?! We didn’t know about this and I don’t like farmed fish anyway. The markets I know all have plenty of fish, so why is this needed in our favourite (you pick) — swimming hole, sailing/fishing/hiking/picnic area, etc. —and, What about the whales?!” (Note to reader here…we use the term “fish” as defined by the FAO (2020): “fish” includes oysters, scallops, animals, but not seaweeds…more on seaweeds below.) So, what’s the problem here? Why is the public opposing aquaculture’s obvious sane and more sustainable food developments/choices (to us) in these new geographies that have, according to the experts (Kapetsky et al. 2013, Costa-Pierce 2016, Gentry et al. 2017, Searchinger et al. 2018, Cottrell et al. 2019, Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2019), seriously exciting, large new areas of potential for accelerated aquaculture developments? We are of the opinion that it is partly us who are the problem. Yes, us; and the people we have educated, trained (and love); who we always called throughout our careers, the “good aquaculture people Introduction We have been following the acceleration of the formation of non-traditional aquaculture groups and organizations and their more frequent messaging about aquaculture in the era of COVID-19. We are concerned that some of what we are reading and listening to is returning to failed parts of our past decades and is fanciful —more hype than reality—and misinformed. In addition, we are dismayed by the promotion of global aquaculture information being used to inform the basis and background for local aquaculture developments, especially in the areas of the world where we work and refer to throughout this article as aquaculture’s “new geographies,” i.e., almost everywhere outside of Asia where aquaculture is new and not traditional. These new geographies are where aquaculture production remains very small and its practices relatively rare. We are well aware that over the past 2-3 decades there are fabulous new developments in new aquaculture geographies for aquaculture in Asia—Bangladesh (nowworld’s fifth largest producer) and Myanmar (now the world’s ninth largest producer) come to mind (FAO 2020) —but, from our Asian experiences, aquaculture there is so very different in its historical, social-ecological, consumer, market and political/ governance contexts and settings to be almost irrelevant as models for the rest of the world. Our aquaculture milieu is best characterized by its nearly complete absence of local education and experiences with aquaculture in nearly all of its public, social, consumer and political spaces in society. Routinely, we have to start at a grade-school level with even the most educated in society to define the word “aquaculture.” Imagine if this was any other type of land-based food production. Do you always have to define the farming of broccoli as agriculture to your communities? Do you always have to define cabbage? For all the benefits we see to expanding aquaculture as a community of industries, seafood trade and aquaculture professionals and academics in organizations like the World Aquaculture Society, aquaculture in its new geographies is a miniscule part of our agriculture, natural resource and ocean economies. It is commonly tucked away, distant, hard to get to, see and experience. Besides its newness, comparable to the “pre-ancestor stage” of agriculture developments, aquaculture’s specific resource needs constantly lead to social/governmental dysfunction and conflicts. Nonetheless, almost every week the professional seafood communications and media outlets (and the mainstream ones too) The Hype, Fantasies and Realities of Aquaculture Development Globally and In Its New Geographies Barry Antonio Costa-Pierce and Thierry Chopin ( C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 2 4 ) We both support sustainable aquaculture practices. However, we should be cautious with the hype we are subjected to daily. We have a collective responsibility to identify, and denounce, the Silver Bullet Solution Salespersons, remembering that in between periods of promising the Moon, there are painful “purgatory” periods of non-constructive regressions.