The Blue Commons by Guy Standing

Author:Guy Standing [Standing, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241475904
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Aquaculture: Saviour or Threat?

Aquaculture – not the internet – represents the most promising investment opportunity of the 21st century.

— Peter Drucker

Fish farming has existed for many thousands of years. In Australia, Aboriginal peoples were practising a form of aquaculture as far back as 40,000 years ago, using fish traps to capture and hold fish. Chinese farmers raised carp in their paddy fields 2,500 years ago, and around the same time primitive aquaculture may have started in ancient Egypt, with the farming of tilapia.

Traditionally, fish farming took place in rivers and lakes that were part of the commons. In England, the ‘right of piscary’, the right of commoners to catch and keep fish, was enshrined in the Charter of the Forest of 1217. But in recent years fish farming has expanded dramatically all over the world, encouraged in part by the crisis of overfishing and degraded marine ecosystems, in part by globalization and its impact on world trade, and in part by advances in technology and the pursuit of corporate profits.

The growth of industrial fish farming has produced an unprecedented value chain, whereby fish bred in one country or region are taken to another to be processed, and exported to yet another to be sold and consumed. In ‘tuna ranching’, wild juvenile fish are caught and reared in cages or pens in the sea, and sent later into the global trading system.

In 1950, aquaculture accounted for less than 3% of global production of fish by weight. Twenty years later it still only accounted for about 4%. But between 1970 and today, particularly since the late 1980s, production has expanded exponentially. In the 1950s, global production was less than a million tonnes; in 2018 it was eighty-two million tonnes, and worth some $250 million.1 By 2000, aquaculture accounted for over a quarter of all production and in 2018 just under half. A monumental transformation has taken place.

With capture fishery production broadly static since the late 1980s, aquaculture overtook wild fish for human consumption in 2016, and the World Bank has predicted that it will supply two-thirds of human consumption of fish by 2030. It is by far the world’s fastest growing food-producing sector, easily outpacing human population growth and the increase in food production on land. If the Great Acceleration in the 1950s marked the first Industrial Revolution in the blue economy, the surge of aquaculture could be said to mark the second.

Although more than 500 aquatic species are farmed around the world, including some rare and threatened species, commercial production centres on about twenty-five species – mainly salmon, carp, clams, pangasius, shrimp and tilapia. Salmon and shrimp are two of the top five species consumed by Europeans; virtually all the salmon and half of the shrimp consumed now come from aquaculture.

Farming of freshwater fish has historically been the main focus of aquaculture, and still accounts for nearly two-thirds of aquaculture fish production by weight. Freshwater aquaculture is dominated by plant-eating (herbivorous) finfish, led by several varieties of carp. Alongside marine

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