THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 30, 1996 TAG: 9609280151
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DENNIS T. AVERY, BRIDGE NEWS
DATELINE: CHURCHVILLE, VA. LENGTH: 97 lines
The world's catch of wild fish increased nearly fivefold between 1950 and 1985, but the fishermen have managed no increase since 1985 despite deploying thousands of additional boats, electronic fish finders and drift nets.
Is fish the next food crisis?
Scientists are warning we may already be catching all the fish that can be caught without collapsing the natural fish populations. ``Vacuuming the Seas'' is the cover story in a current environmental magazine.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization forecasts a shortfall of 30 million tons of food fish by the year 2000, with the fish shortage rising far higher in subsequent years.
Lester Brown's Worldwatch Institute calls the stagnating world fish catch ``one of the imminent limits to human population.'' But it's not. In fact, we should be able to eat more fish per person, even when the world population has peaked at 9 billion people in 2040.
We'll just have to grow them on fish farms. We'll have to feed them grain and oilseeds, as we feed our other meat-producing creatures.
At the moment, fishing is the world's last vestige of hunting and gathering - man's most ancient and inadequate system of food-supply. If we still tried to get our poultry and red meat that way, there wouldn't be a wild bird or mammal still alive on the earth. We'd have hunted them all down ages ago. Certainly we've hunted down all of the fish we could find.
The world's fishing fleet is now up to 1 million vessels, many with fish finders, aerial spotters, satellite navigation systems and drift nets up to 40 miles long.
When fish began to get scarce, we didn't encourage the fish with more habitat or better food. (That's what we've done with domestic livestock and poultry.) Instead, national governments encouraged the fishermen with subsidies.
The U.S. has poured $100 million worth of subsidies into the Alaska fishery.
The European Union's fishing subsidies are now nearly $600 million per year, with much of the money going for new boats and equipment! All of this has done nothing but let us catch the same quantity of fish in less time. Before the other guy. The 200-mile fishing limits should have helped. Most of the world's fish stocks are near land, because that's where most of the food is.
(The open ocean floor has been described as mostly ``marine desert.'') But shutting out the Russians or the Japanese doesn't bring back a coastal fishery if it just means your own boats overfish the same waters.
What we need are more fish habitat and more fish food, to produce more and bigger fish. That's where fish farming comes in. (Good fish farming generates a better feed-to-food conversion ratio than poultry, so the farmed fish are not only popular but a good use of farming resources.)
While the wild fish catch has stagnated, farmed fish production has increased more than 75 percent since 1980 - and risen from 12 percent of total supply to 17 percent. Asian fish farmers lead the world, and researchers have recently given them a ``superfish.''
The International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management rebred one of the most popular farmed fish, the tilapia, from original stocks in Africa. The tilapia not only has sweet, firm flesh but generates high growth rates even when it's crowded into muddy ponds. The center applied the lessons learned in breeding chickens and hogs. It tagged 25,000 fingerling fish to get a super-tilapia that grows 60 percent faster and has a 50 percent higher survival rate.
The superfish is already being distributed in the Philippines and China, with other countries lining up. (Tilapia seem to tolerate almost anything but cold weather. Most parts of North America and Europe are too chilly to raise them outdoors.)
Meanwhile, Chile has created a caged salmon industry in the Southern Hemisphere, where no salmon have existed before.
Since Japan has been shut off from most wild fish by 200-mile fishing limits, it has developed a significant coastal salmon industry based on releasing hatchery fish. (The U.S. West Coast does the same thing.) Norway is farming so many salmon that Europe has a surplus. Shrimp farming has increased sevenfold worldwide. There's even a scheme to put fertilizer in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Florida and harvest the additional fish off North Carolina. (Don't bet on the environmental permits for that one being issued any time soon.)
All this fish-farming expansion has happened even though fish breeding and disease control are still at a primitive stage, about where livestock and poultry breeding were 100 years ago.
Meanwhile, a research study published in Science magazine last year indicates that nearly all of the depleted commercial fish species in the wild can recover if we ease the fishing pressure. That includes the striped bass along the East Coast of the U.S. As usual, environmental groups are saying that fish farming may be bad. But they are reluctant to accept any technologies that seem to sustain modern economies.
They should note the study published in Science. It evaluated 128 fish stocks and concluded that only three had been overfished to the point of permanent commercial extinction.
Let's hope the new Blue Revolution matches the Green Revolution in adding food productivity and carrying capacity for both humans and wildlife. MEMO: Dennis T. Avery is editor of the Global Food Quarterly, author of
``Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic'' and was formerly the
State Department's senior agricultural analyst. Both book and quarterly
are published by the Hudson Institute, Indianapolis. by CNB