Go Blue! Seafood Sustainability

Are Wild Fisheries Destined to Become Less Important

to Our Food Supply as Aquaculture Advances?

To address this question in the broadest context possible, a summary of the developmental history of terrestrial agriculture is helpful to gain perspective:

It has taken man over 10,000 years to domesticate an array of wild terrestrial plants and animals and distribute them around the globe.  During this developmental time period apples, oranges, tomatoes, carrots, corn, wheat, rice, cows, pigs, chickens and many other plants and animals have been selectively cultured and introduce worldwide for the purpose of feeding mankind.  Today agriculture sustains a world population of over 7 billion people.  While aquatic plants and animals have also been cultured for thousands of years, it has been on a much smaller scale and has contributed far less than agriculture has in enabling the explosive growth in human population.

Aquatic plants and animals are farther behind in the domestication process than their terrestrial counterparts, but aquaculture is rapidly changing this by virtue of being the fastest growing food production system in the world.  Progress is being made in various selective breeding programs and gene splicing technologies are being explored that are similar in concept to those that have been applied in creating GM (genetically modified) corn and soybeans.

The historic development of agriculture has allowed man to become the most dominant species on Earth, but one of the costs has been that natural land ecosystems can no longer provide adequate supplies of wild food by the ancient hunting and gathering methods.   Our current ocean and freshwater ecosystems are the last places on Earth that are still able to provide us with significant quantities of wild food by the traditional “hunting and gathering” methods.  However, just as with our land masses, a day will come where these wild fisheries cannot provide an adequate supply of food for our exploding population and therefore domesticated aquatic plants and animals produced by aquaculture will become the major sources of our seafood.

As the world population approaches 9 billion by the year 2050, wild fisheries will become less important to our overall food supply as aquaculture advances.  However, we should not let the world’s aquatic ecosystems suffer the same fate of degradation and destruction which has befallen many our terrestrial ecosystems due to agricultural spatial requirements and activities.  In our collective struggle to survive we should not destroy the very resources that sustain us and our future generations.

Thank you.....Sincerely, Dave...Please feel free to leave your comments & Happy Holidays ! !