Aquaculture: Greening the Blue Revolution
By Dr. Jason Clay

The world's resources are limited. Nowhere is this clearer than with seafood, where an estimated 76 percent of global fisheries are already fished at or beyond capacity. The global seafood catch has been flat for nearly a decade. Yet, per capita demand is increasing each year. Scientists warn that some important fish populations - tuna, swordfish and Chilean sea bass among them - could collapse before the year 2050, threatening one of the world's major food sources and the livelihoods of more than a billion people.

The problem appears insurmountable. It is not.

One solution is aquaculture: the deliberate farming of more than 400 marine and freshwater species that now provides close to 50 percent of all the edible seafood produced each year.

An Ages-Old Practice Takes Root Aquaculture started in Asia more than 4,000 years ago with oysters in Japan and carp in China. A Chinese scholar named Fan Li wrote the first book on fish farming in the fifth century B.C. The Romans followed suit several centuries later. In the United States, aquaculture of sorts began with oysters by the time of the Revolutionary War and in earnest with trout around the mid-1800s.

Several theories exist on why and how the practice began - one holds that fish farming began when changes in river flows created natural lakes filled with fish; another posits that it began in response to the concentration of fish left behind in isolated areas of water after monsoon floods receded.

WWF is committed to ensuring that aquaculture's role in the future of seafood is a good one.

What is certain is that humans living near water have often adapted to their environment by becoming fishermen, and among them have been enterprising individuals who recognized the potential of managing fish populations as a way to ensure a stable source of food.

Global and Domestic Domination While aquaculture today is a global industry, Asia still dominates:

China alone produces three times the combined volume of the 11 next-largest producers, including Chile and Norway. While the U.S. is not a top producer, fish are farmed in all 50 states.

Aquaculture production dominates the seafood Americans consume. Most salmon, trout, catfish, tilapia, oysters, clams, mussels and scallops are produced by aquaculture, as well as about half of the shrimp consumed in this country.

Top 12 Global Producers by Volume and Value
Most of the world's top-producing aquaculture countries are in Asia, where the practice began around 2000 B.C. Increasingly, however, countries are recognizing the need to complement wild-caught seafood with farmed equivalents, as well as the economic value of doing so.

Increasing at a strong 8 to 10 percent per year for the past three decades, aquaculture is the fastest growing food production system in the world. Done right, aquaculture holds great promise to produce high-quality, large volumes of seafood. It can, however, have serious negative environmental and social impacts. Furthermore, the learning curve for sustainability in aquaculture is quite steep. To put it in perspective, fish farmers are trying to learn in just 30 years what land farmers have learned over 6,000 years.

Starting Small, with Shrimp In 1994, WWF targeted aquaculture as a key industry to monitor for its potential environmental and social impacts, both good and bad. We first took a look at the shrimp industry, with a side-by-side study to determine whether aquaculture or trawling posed the greater environmental threat. From this study we concluded that, while both had negative consequences, the shrimp aquaculture producers already had the technology to reduce a number of the major ones. We decided to expand our commitment in this area, knowing that we would be able to help identify and promote practices that would make aquaculture more sustainable.

In 1999 we launched the Shrimp Aquaculture and the Environment partnership to reduce the negative side effects of shrimp aquaculture. Our partners in this initiative were the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, and the Network of Aquaculture Centres in Asia-Pacific. Three years, 1 million dollars and 45 research studies later, we had in-hand the most credible, up-to-date information on the industry. We built global consensus about the key impacts and documented how the problematic ones could be reduced. Then we moved into action to do just that, improving the industry globally.

From Shrimp to Salmon Success breeds success, in fish farming as much as anywhere else. In 2003, the Packard Foundation, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform and Marine Harvest asked WWF to create a similar program for salmon aquaculture. With experience on these two important and heavily traded species, we saw the potential of aquaculture to help us deliver results for other species. For 12 farmed species, we evaluated the key impacts, identified better practices, and analyzed costs. We built consensus about both the problems and solutions posed by each type of aquaculture. And we made the information available to all the parties involved.

Our in-depth research has become the standard reference for our aquaculture staff - and for our colleagues at the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the International Finance Corporation and other organizations.

The Aquaculture Dialogues Backed by a decade of research and our growing network of partners, we developed an innovative approach to improving the industry on an ongoing basis and from the inside out. In 2004, we initiated the Aquaculture Dialogues - species-specific collaborations among producers, buyers, feed companies, academics, nongovernmental organizations, and others with a stake in ensuring the environmental and economic future of the species.

It's our way of bringing the aquaculture industry - from producers to buyers - and the conservation community together for the greater good. The science-based discussions identify areas of agreement, areas of disagreement, and critical areas where more research is needed. We have Dialogues in full operation for tilapia, salmon, molluscs and pangasius, a kind of catfish from the Mekong River and its estuaries in Vietnam. Our work on shrimp began last year and we are about to start on seaweed, abalone and trout.

The Dialogues: A Way Forward Each Dialogue group develops standards and global performance benchmarks for a specific species. The benchmarks define the state of aquaculture for that species as it is today. The standards will reduce six to eight of the most significant negative impacts against today's norm. The standards form the basis for eventual certification based on the reduction of practices ranging from the use of antibiotics and other chemicals, to land and water use and genetic alteration of the species. Standards for as many as 12 aquaculture species should be completed by the Aquaculture Dialogues by the end of 2009.

Global Fisheries and Aquaculture Production
This chart shows the volume of global production of fish, both wild and farmed. The green layer - wild fish caught for human consumption - is the largest share. The light orange layer shows the steady growth of aquaculture. The global seafood catch has been unable to keep pace with growing consumption, opening the door for farmed fish, which now accounts for half of the seafood consumption by humans.

We compare current performance for an individual producer, a country, or even a region to the standards we have set. And we study the practices of the better performers, documenting which practices improve performance under which conditions, what they cost, and what the net effect is on producers. This information goes back out to the industry, helping everyone in it to achieve higher levels of environmental and social responsibility.

From Better Practices to Credible Certification WWF's approach to working effectively with the aquaculture industry involves listening more and talking less. We listen to individuals and businesses as they relate their experience and what they have learned about key impacts.

We are especially attentive to how some of them have been able to bring the negative aspects of aquaculture down to more acceptable levels. We identify and evaluate the better practices and the business case behind each. This adds to consensus on the issues and a substantial amount of reliable business and environmental knowledge that can be used to convince other producers to follow the same path.

WWF has a long history setting standards and promoting independent certification. Here we are breaking ground, going beyond defining standards to actually measuring performance against them. We are starting with standards based on what 10 to 30 percent of the industry can already do - standards that we know are fair and attainable. The goal, then, is to motivate the rest of the industry to adopt and meet these standards. Over time, the performance of the entire industry will improve.

Catching the Biggest Fish Our transparent approach has attracted salmon producers like Marine Harvest, major feed companies like Nutreco and Cargill, food distributors like Sysco, and seafood retailers like IKEA (in their restaurants and food markets) and others. They look to WWF because they know us to be science based and they trust us to ensure credible processes and measurable standards.

Some companies join us to improve their own performance, others want to make sure that their clients perform well. Still others want their suppliers involved so that they can live with the results. Some companies have already seen that reducing negative effects can in fact make their operations more efficient and more profitable. We encourage all of the companies to talk about standards with their consumers, expanding public awareness of why this and other industries must become more sustainable.

The Inevitable Conclusion Aquaculture is inevitable. And it is a necessity. From its origins at a local level in both agriculture and fishing based societies, it has become a fast-growing global industry with businesses ranging from small-scale operations to global corporations.  Fishing is the only large-scale source of food from the wild. There is increasing pressure on wild fisheries. Today we use more and more effort and technology to chase fewer and fewer fish. For good or bad, aquaculture is here to stay.

WWF is committed to ensuring that aquaculture is a good thing - for people and for nature. Simply put, we need it - to support global demand for seafood, encourage better management of wild fisheries, create jobs and wealth in many countries, alleviate poverty, and ensure the availability of healthy, nutritious food around the world.

Our work in aquaculture complements our increasing efforts to make global fisheries more sustainable and help extend the role of wildcaught seafood certification through the Marine Stewardship Council.

Dr. Jason Clay is WWF's senior vice president for global markets, responsible for our work transforming markets in ways that protect the world's most valuable natural resources. He has coauthored articles on aquaculture in the journals Nature, Science, and Scientific American. His book World Agriculture and the Environment will be followed by publication of World Aquaculture and the Environment in the coming year.