aquaculture

The Native Fish Conservancy is about preserving the North American aquatic heritage. A group of like-minded conservationists, they are seeking other people, willing to donate time and skills to the ongoing development and production of the e-newsletter, the web site, and marketing. The Native Fish Conservancy is a not-for-profit, volunteer run organisation. Although their emphasis is on North American species, no doubt they would welcome international members. From a more commercial aquacultural perspective, a lot can be learned from people who keep fish as a hobby – people who have the time and resources to carefully develop breeding, feeding, and raising strategies that could be scaled into full scale commercial enterprises.

According to William A. Wurts from the Kentucky State University, Cooperative Extension Program, Sustainable Aquaculture in the Twenty-First Century (a .pdf download – Reviews in Fisheries Science, 8(2): 141-150 (2000)) people have approached sustainability from three perspectives: environmental, economic, and sociological. Wurts notes in the abstract:

Ultimately, sustainability may be the aquaculture industry’s ability to adapt on a planet with an ever increasing human population which continues to consume its limited supply of non-renewable resources at an alarming rate.

Although ever increasing costs of resources such as oil and water continue to apply pressure to the development of sustainable models across all spectra of human endeavor, the discussion around sustainable aquaculture is not exactly new. Sustainable Aquaculture Development and the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries was presented by William D. Dar to the FAO, Rome in March 1999.

Sustainability is also not just a concern of aquaculture – the broader concerns of ocean governance has also been considered by George Pararas-Carayannis in Ocean Governance and Sustainability – Present Trends – Future Challenges. From the abstract:

The ability of marine ecosystems to produce the economic and ecological goods and services that are desired and needed, have been substantially reduced. In some instances there has been a significant decline of ocean wildlife and even collapses of ocean ecosystems. It is clearly evident that what we once considered to be inexhaustible and resilient is, in fact, finite and fragile.

Patrick Sorgeloos offers comment regarding Technologies for Sustainable Aquaculture Development. From the introduction:

Risks of major environmental and human-health problems need to be weighed against achieving a more cautious rise in production that is, in the longer term, sustainable. We should all see this not only as a challenge to do it well and responsibly, but also as a commercial opportunity for the industry.

Aquaculture is clearly at a crossroads and can come, in fact, should come of age in the twenty-first century. However, this will require more responsible researchers and more integrated R&D approaches than we apply at present.

Denis Bailly and Rolf Willmann have provided research findings entitled Promoting Sustainable Aquaculture through Economic and other Incentives. From the abstract:

Economic incentives have been widely applied to encourage growth in aquaculture production, especially in the “infant” phase of development where risks are often high and scale economies cannot yet be realized. In recent years, increasing attention has been given to incentives that encourage the use of environmental and natural resources in a sustainable manner. This growing interest is not least due to the frequently disappointing performance of command and control measures. Different kinds of incentives can be developed in isolation or in combination, including tradable use/access rights, taxes/subsidies, codes of conduct, eco-labelling and others. While practical experiences are still very limited in aquaculture, these measures have proven effective in other sectors to induce producers to adopt better and more environmentally friendly production practices.

SEAFDEC Aquaculture Department (2005) has published a Code of Practice for Sustainable Use of Mangrove Ecosystems for Aquaculture in Southeast Asia.

Objectives of the Code of Practice
• To define principles, guidelines, and best practices for responsible aquaculture in mangrove ecosystems in Southeast Asia
• To provide a tool to guide States, non-government organizations, research and academic institutions, aquaculture practitioners, mangrove managers, local communities, global and regional aid and financial institutions, and other stakeholders concerned with both responsible aquaculture and the conservation and sustainable use of mangrove ecosystems
• To recommend key legislation and enforcement mechanisms to ensure both responsible aquaculture and the conservation and sustainable use of mangroves.

From the introduction:

Mangrove ecosystems (or simply ‘mangroves’) are the tide-influenced wetland complex consisting of mangrove forests, estuaries, lagoons, and associated habitats along the coasts and around islands in the tropics and subtropics. The mangrove forest consists of seawater-adapted flowering trees and shrubs, and the many associated ferns, fungi, and algae, including many epiphytes. The ‘true mangrove’ plants are members of the genera Rhizophora, Bruguiera, Ceriops, Avicennia, Sonneratia, Xylocarpus, Heritiera, and Excoecaria.

Mangroves support microscopic to large, terrestrial and aquatic (marine and freshwater), transient and resident wildlife. The mangrove physical environment includes waterways, mudflats, salt pans, and islands, with a wide ranges of salinities, daily tidal flood and ebb, and anaerobic mud bottoms.

The proceedings of a workshop held at Nong Nuch Village, Pattaya, Thailand, 27-31 May 1985, sponsored by the United Nations University and the National Research Council of Thailand have been edited by Peter Kunstadter, Eric C. F. Bird, and Sanga Sabhasri; and are available as an online book.

Subtitled The Socio-economic Situation of Human Settlements in Mangrove Forests, the introduction has this to say:

More than half the world’s people live in coastal regions, utilizing such resources as salt, minerals, fish, and crustaceans, the products of mangroves, salt marsh, seagrass, and kelp, energy from wind, waves, and tides, and such materials as sand, gravel, clay, and limestone, all obtained from the coast or the adjacent sea. Moreover, the coast provides sites for settlement, agriculture and aquaculture, ports and harbours, industry, commerce, and recreation. The management of coastal environments and their resources has raised many problems in both developed and developing countries, and it was felt appropriate that the United Nations University should give emphasis to this field of study.

The Coastal Resources Management Project was initiated as part of the University’s Natural Resources Programme. It was decided that the coastal environment – comprising the foreshore (between high and low tide lines), backshore (above high tide line to the landward limit of marine influences), and nearshore (from low tide line out to a depth of 20 metres) zones was a distinctive field for research and training that merited its own project within the programme.

A number of research studies and workshops were commissioned under this theme. Man in the Mangroves contains papers presented at a UNU-sponsored workshop. Three of the papers result from UNU research. The remainder were submitted by independent researchers. They focus on the socio-economic aspects of the use, development, and management of mangrove areas in relation to environmental and ecological factors.

Although the Coastal Resources Management Project has now been concluded, the University’s new programme on Resource Policy and Management has undertaken to maintain an international dimension in research, training, and dissemination, stressing the interaction of resource management, conservation, and development.

Mangroves have always naturally protected tropical coastlines from erosion. More recently, shrimp farms have applied pressures to the natural forests. In response to the clearing of the forests, mangrove ‘greenbelts’ are being used to prevent coastal erosion.

Joan Martinez-Alier, from the Department of Economics and Economic History, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain has published a report entitled Ecological Conflicts and Valuation – mangroves vs. shrimp in the late 1990s. From the abstract:

Shrimps are produced in two different ways. They are fished in the sea (sometimes at the cost of turtle destruction) or they are “farmed” in ponds in coastal areas. Such aquaculture is increasing around the world as shrimps become a valuable item of world trade. Mangrove forests are sacrificed for commercial shrimp farming. This paper considers the conflict between mangrove conservation and shrimp exports in different countries. Who has title to the mangroves, who wins and who loses in this tragedy of enclosures? Which languages of valuation are used by different actors in order to compare the increase in shrimp exports and the losses in livelihoods and in environmental services? The economic valuation of damages is only one of the possible languages of valuation which are relevant in practice. Who has the power to impose a particular language of valuation?

From the Introduction:

In many coastal areas of the tropical world, in Ecuador, Honduras, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Malaysia, there is social resistance against the introduction of shrimp farming for export, since this implies the uprooting of mangroves in order to build the ponds. In such areas, poor people live sustainably in or near the mangrove forests, by collecting shellfish, by fishing, by making use of mangrove wood for charcoal and building materials. The mangroves are usually public land in all countries, being in the tidal zone, but governments give private concessions for shrimp farming or the land is enclosed illegally by shrimp growers. Illegality is prevalent not only because of the public character of the land, but also because there are often specific environmental laws and court decisions protecting the mangroves as valuable ecosystems.

Shrimp or prawn production entails the uprooting of the mangroves, and the loss of livelihood of people living directly from, and also selling, mangrove products. Beyond direct human livelihood, other functions of mangroves are also lost, perhaps irreversibly, such as coastal defence against sea level rise, breeding grounds for fish, carbon sinks, repositories of biodiversity (e.g. genetic resources resistant to salinity), together with aesthetic values. Pollution from the shrimp ponds destroys the local fisheries. Also, wild shrimp disappear because of the loss of breeding grounds in mangroves and because they are overharvested as seed for the ponds.