To help preserve our wild
oceans, modern aquaculture will continue its transition away from using marine
fishmeal and fish oil as feed ingredients.
Environmentalists have long championed safeguarding our natural
marine living resources from the damages caused by our relentless efforts to
feed our growing world population. They do
not ever want to see our oceans succumb to what our lands have become where wild
animal and plant populations can no longer provide us with food and where we
have become critically dependent upon a very limited variety of domesticated plants
and animals for our survival.
Simply put, environmentalists want to preserve the diverse
wild state of our oceans that truly represent Earth’s last remaining great natural
ecosystems that can provide significant quantities of wild foods for our continued survival.
However, wild marine fisheries are maxed out and can only
supply about 50% of our current seafood needs. Aquaculture currently supplies the other 50%
and will be responsible for satisfying all of our future needs as our population
explodes to 10 billion people by the year 2050.
To meet the world’s future seafood demands, the
aquaculture industry will need to assure that there is a constantly growing
supply of environmentally sustainable feed ingredients to fuel its
ever-expanding growth. Over 70% of our
farmed seafood is currently dependent upon artificial feed formulations. Without the constantly increasing availability
of aquacultural feeds, our global system of farming our most favorite seafoods
such as salmon, shrimp, tilapia, and pangasius will collapse.
Aquaculture today still depends upon fishmeal and fish
oil rendered from wild marine forage fisheries such as anchovies, menhaden, and
Antarctic krill to help satisfy its need for suitable nutritional feeds. Ever since aquaculture production exploded
worldwide in the eighties, environmentalists have voiced their concerns about
whether it makes sense to feed wild fish to farmed fish. For many years the aquaculture feed industry
has been confronting this concern by continually striving to reduce its use of
wild sourced marine fishmeal and fish oil.
Here is a look at the progress made so far and to what
the future may hold:
1. Starting in the early nineties and continuing to today,
the aquaculture feed industry started reducing the amount of fishmeal and fish oil by substituting sources from
livestock byproducts (e.g. Chicken bones, feathers, scraps), grains such as
soybeans, and by recovering trimmings from seafood processing and even lately, adding
omega 3 fatty acids from GMO yeasts! Since
the nineties, the use of marine derived fishmeal and fish oil has generally
been reduced by 60-70%.
2. Looking forward, rapidly developing feed technologies
harnessing the ability of microbes, algae, and even insects to provide high
quality proteins and fatty acids will further help reduce the amount of wild
fish ingredients used in aquacultural feed formulations.
Conclusions: The
initial concerns of environmentalists about feeding wild fish to farmed fish are
steadily fading away as new feed technologies advance to assure aquaculture can
continue its explosive growth fueled by environmentally sustainable feed
sources. Aquaculture is certainly doing
its part in helping to preserve our wild oceans; Earth’s last great natural ecosystems that
still have the remarkable ability to provide us with bountiful wild foods.
Go Blue! For Our Environment
– For Sustainability – For Our Health
Sincerely,
David Glaubke, Director of Sustainability Initiatives
Sea Port Products Corp.
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