Sustainable Ecological Aquaculture Systems : The Need for a New Social Contract for Aquaculture Development

l Ecohistories of aquaculture suggest that aquaculture is a natural part of human development throughout history and that modern, industrial aquaculture could strengthen its social and ecological roots by articulating its evolution along a sustainability trajectory and by adopting fully the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) ecosystems approach to aquaculture (EAA; Soto et al., 2008). The EAA creates a new code for global aquaculture development, combining into one common framework the two most important social–ecological trajectories for global aquaculture—aquaculture for the world’s rich and aquaculture for the world’s poor. Knowledge of the rich archeology and anthropology of aquaculture connects this FAO code to antiquity, creating a single development pathway for aquaculture throughout human history. Without widespread adoption of an EAA, FAO (2009) projections of aquaculture development over the next 30 years may provide a far too optimistic scenario for its global growth. In this regard, aquaculture over the last 20 years has been criticized as lacking adequate attention and investment in developing grassroots, democratic, extension processes to engage a broader group of stakeholders to evolve the “blue revolution.” As an example, there has been a failure of fisheries and aquaculture to plan together to ensure sustainable supplies of seafood—the world’s most valuable proteins for human health—for seafood-eating peoples. Nonfed aquaculture (seaweeds, shellfish) has received worldwide attention for its rapid movement toward greater sustainability, which has led to more widespread social acceptance. For fed aquaculture, recent trends analyses have suggested that aquaculture is turning from the ocean to land-based agriculture to provide its protein feeds and oils. As such, more sophisticated, ecologically planned and designed “aquaculture ecosystems” will become more widespread because they better fit the social–ecological context of both rich and poor countries. Ecological aquaculture provides the basis for developing a new social contract for aquaculture that is inclusive of all stakeholders and decision makers in fisheries, agriculture, and ecosystems conservation and restoration. for Seafood he Food and Agriculture OrganiThe successful application of new knowledge and breakthrough technologies, which are likely to occur with ever-increasing frequency, will require an entirely new interdisciplinary approach to policy-making: one that operates in an agile problem-solving environment and works effectively at the interface where science and technology meet business and public policy. It must be rooted in a vastly improved understanding of people, organizations, cultures, and nations and be implemented by innovative strategies and new methods of communication (Lane, 2006). Aquaculture Is Not a Global Panacea T zation (FAO, 2009) “State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008 Report” received much press due to its loud pronouncement that aquaculture now contributes about half of the world’s seafood. This release was celebrated by global aquaculture advocates and policy makers but also was met with consternation among some capture fisheries and environmental NGO circles. At aquaculture conventions worldwide, this news was greeted with much boasting—the kind of which is routine among keynote speakers at aquaculture gatherings— which recant a tale that reads like, “because the world capture fisheries are dead or all collapsing, that the world must turn rapidly away from hunting the seas, to farming them, and that aquaculture must (and will) grow at a breathtaking pace everywhere.” However, if we look more closely at the FAO (2009) statistics, we do not have the massive development of aquaculture all over planet Earth everywhere outside of China. Aquaculture’s growth is restricted to very few places and countries.With potentially billions of dollars of multilateral and bilateral aid at stake in global aquaculture development, it is important to reanalyze the data which show the following: (1) The world is not eating half of its seafood from aquaculture. The world has watched, and is watching, a blue revolution ... in China. In 2006, China accounted for 67% of all global aquaculture production, 34.4 million metric tons [MMT] of a total world aquaculture production of 51.7 MMT. In addition, Chinese aquaculture production is largely feeding China (FAO, 2009), not the world. For the rest of the world, aquaculture production in 2006 was just 17.2 MMT (FAO, 2009). Therefore, outside of China, aquaculture provided just 23% of world fisheries production, not 47%. In addition, most global aquaculture production remains—for all the controversies over shrimp and salmon—freshwater fish (54%) and mollusks (27%) (FAO, 2009). Especially for mariculture, there are major concerns that it will not experience the phenomenal growth that has occurred for freshwater aquaculture due to user conflicts, lack of suitable sites, water quality degradation, and the high cost and availabilities of feedstuffs. (2) Global capture fisheries are not “dead.” Albeit of great concern due to mismanagement and alarming global trends, especially so since global marine capture fisheries production peaked in the late 1980s (Watson and Pauly, 2001; Pauly et al., 2003), capture fisheries still provide an estimated 81.9 MMT (FAO, 2009) and are the major animal protein source for the majority of seafood-eating peoples of the planet, especially for the world’s poor (Hall et al., 2010). (3) With a few notable exceptions, such as Norway, aquaculture development in the rich countries is very limited in scope and has not occurred to any significant degree. All of Europe and North America provide less than 5% of global aquaculture production (FAO, 2009). The share of world aquaculture production for the 27 nations of the European Union has dropped over the past 10 years from 4% to 2%. In the United States, production declines have been occurred over the past 5 years in farmed catfish, trout, and shrimp, with positive trends only for shellfish aquaculture and salmon aquaculture in Maine. New land-based and coastal sites are limited as the global population has shifted from 97% rural in 1800 to 50% rural in 2007 (United Nations, 2008). In the rich countries, aquaculture development has been slowed by user conflicts and access to sites, obtuse and ever-changing regulatory regimes, lack of government investments at a meaningful commercial scale, consumer disinterest, and a lack of aquaculture education by local, coastal, and other environmental decision makers. (4) With a few notable exceptions such as Brazil, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and Egypt, aquaculture development in the world’s poorest nations has not occurred. In Africa, 200 million people have between 22% and 70% of their dietary May/J animal protein from fish, whereas in developed countries the average is just 13% (Heck et al., 2007). Africa provides only 1% of the world’s aquaculture production ad less than 5% of Africa’s fish production, with most development concentrated in Egypt where aquaculture production has grown 10-fold since the 1990’s (FAO, 2009). To meet seafood demands due to projected population growth to 2030, FAO (2009) has estimated that at least an additional 40MMT of aquatic food will be required to maintain the current per capita consumption. This forecasts that world aquaculture production will exceed 90 million tons and surpass global capture fisheries production. I argue that such an expansion of aquaculture globally in the rich and poor countries outside of China might not occur because of the following: (1) The current industrial aquaculture development paradigm is inadequate at all levels of government and that without major government subsidies, aquaculture will not spread as rapidly in the next two decades as it has in the past two unless ecological aquaculture as an alternative development model for aquaculture becomes the dominant development model. (2) Most national decision makers are unaware of and are not planning for the magnitude of the world’s coastal urban, land, energy, and water crises, and the implications on food production of these vast societal challenges that need to occur—Brown (2009) calls this “mobilizing to save civilization”— and are continuing to be duped by “20th century thinking” into believing that there are vast areas of a virgin ocean planet and adequate feedstuffs just waiting for a large une 2010 Volume 44 Number 3 89 expansion of “fed aquaculture” developments, which there are not. (3) Professional, regulatory “decisionmaker communities” in aquaculture and fisheries are so separate structurally and functionally in many countries to the point that they have lost track of their common goal of delivering environmentally friendly, safe, sustainable seafood to the people they serve. Professional fisheries managers are working everywhere to recover damaged capture fisheries in both developed and developing nations. Recovered fisheries will add price and volume competition to aquaculture in many regions of the world, in some cases making aquaculture development not economically feasible, a fact which may not be captured in global statistics. The world will need all the fish it can produce sustainably from capture fisheries as well as develop aquaculture. Management conflicts and educational deficiencies between fisheries and aquaculture managers will need to end as products that sustain livelihoods will be needed from both. There is an urgent need for institutions that train the next generation of professional stewards in a new “sustainable seafood” paradigm (Smith et al., 2010). This would result in the development of a cadre of decision makers who could conduct the integrated planning for aquaculture, fisheries, ecosystems, and their allied regional social infrastructures. The target areas of the world where this is most needed are ones where aqua