Contents:
A SERIOUS THREAT TO THE SEA AND MARINE ECOSYSTEM:
FISH FARMING OR AQUACULTURE
Fish
farming, or "aquaculture,"
has been practiced by humans for centuries. In Canada, fish farms have been
operational on both coasts since the 1970's.
If practiced sustainably, aquaculture can be a viable alternative to harvesting wild stocks. However, as it is currently being practiced on the Canada coast and also in the Aegean coast of Turkey, especially in Bodrum, it is polluting the environment and seriously threatening the integrity of wild stocks.
The culture of
plants and animals has a long tradition in human history.
The main historical
incentives for cultured food production are:
· to increase the amount of available food
· to reduce the energy costs involved in searching for, gathering and
transporting food
· to improve the stability and predictability of food production
· to improve the reliability of food supply, by cultivating and storing
excess production
· to improve and stabilize food quality
The earliest
records of fish farming date back thousands of years to China where carp,
a freshwater species, was raised in ponds. In time, the practice spread to
Europe where farmed species like tilapia, turbot, cod, sole, catfish, and
sturgeon, are raised in ponds and land-based tank systems.
Most of these
traditional aquaculture methods have proven to be sustainable because they
are ecologically integrated into the agricultural, industrial, and community
fabric, meaning, for example, that wastes become fertilizers rather than pollutants.
Additionally these species are herbivores so other fish species are not used
in their production unlike in salmon farming.
In fact, the move to marine aquaculture has been fraught with problems starting with the need to engineer floating mesh and later metal net cages, and in the case of salmon, transferring large quantities of live juvenile fish - which are produced in freshwater - to the cages in the oceans.
***In Turkey,
sea bream and sea bass are cultivated instead of salmon.
The other most-common
farmed seafood are shellfish like oysters, clams, mussels, scallops, and shrimp
which are mainly produced in tropical nations where coastal mangrove forests
have been cut down and replaced with shrimp farms that supply markets in Europe,
Japan and the US. These mangroves once sheltered wild fish and shrimp, which
local people caught to feed their families. After a few years, waste from
shrimp farms builds up in the ponds, making further cultivation impossible
and farmers must move on. Then, local people are left without shrimp farms
or mangrove forests.
Shellfish farming
can be beneficial because shellfish can improve water quality as they clear
the water of excess plankton. Shellfish need clean water so cultivation can
keep coastal waters clean. The size of the commercial operation, however,
can have serious impacts because shellfish farming significantly alters the
habitats of beaches and intertidal areas.
Clams and some
types of oysters are farmed on beaches where habitat can be damaged from bad
farming practices like driving large vehicles on the beach and changing entire
ecosystems to accommodate the farmed species, which is often not native to
the area.
Increasingly,
people around the world are eating more seafood than ever before, which is
driving production of farmed species. The ecological impact of fish farming
ranges from benign to catastrophic, and depends on which species are raised,
how they are raised and where the farm is located. Before buying farmed
fish, a visit to web sites like the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch
program or the Audubon Society's seafood guide is a good idea.
