In the spotlight 1
Community-centred aquaculture: Supporting people, food, and ecosystems
Aquaculture (often called seafood or fish farming) is a system of management of aquatic plants and animals in coastal places. Many types of aquaculture have been practiced for millennia and were historically created through place-based observations of the land and water. When done in ecologically responsible ways, aquaculture can be a powerful bedrock for local communities, economies, and food systems.
A responsible aquaculture practice is guided by several principles that ensure good relationships with the environment and local communities. This includes operating a farm at a scale that is appropriate for the given species and in the context of the local ecology. A proper scale ensures that the farm is in harmony with the local ecology and allows for broad community access. The farm should also be owned and operated by the local community so that most of the benefits remain within the community. Being part of the community also means not competing for space or resources with other local harvesters, farmers, and fishers. These practices should also reflect that the waters are a public resource and that their ongoing management should be based on systems of participatory governance.
There still do exist some instances of sustainable aquaculture in modern times. There are practices that are operated at an appropriate scale, managed and operated by people embedded in the community, done in harmony with wild fish populations, and affirming of the waters being a shared, public resource. One traditional form of aquaculture that has been practiced globally is creating fish traps, often from stone and/or wood, in inter-tidal zones. Every community has their own unique traditions and formations they create, but many of these practices have existed for thousands of years.
One such example of ecologically responsible aquaculture are the clam gardens in the pacific northwest of Turtle Island (North America) which have been stewarded by several Indigenous Peoples including the Tlingit, Haida, Heiltsuk, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Northern, Central, and Southern Coast Salish, among others[1]. The scale and ecological responsibility of these gardens are responsibly managed, but the issue of ownership is complex mostly due to impositions from colonial histories. Many of these gardens exist within several jurisdictional lines, between state waters, federal national park lands, country borders, and other situations. These communities have to navigate incredibly complex systems to continue these gardens in their historic locations and people of the waters continue to battle for recognition for their ages old way of life, in land and oceans, rivers, and mangroves across all watery environments in all regions of the world.
In the spotlight 2
Breeding corporate control in industrial aquaculture
From the 1960s-80s, “Green Revolution” programmes in agriculture replaced hundreds of thousands of farmer varieties with a few high-yielding ones. These crops caused massive disease and pest outbreaks, creating dependence on corporate seeds, fertilisers and pesticides. A similar genetic “revolution” is rapidly spreading through aquaculture.
The expansion of industrial farms of marine species with huge commercial value is causing massive environmental damage and undermining traditional fisheries and aquaculture. These farms depend on new varieties that are increasingly controlled by corporations with interests in feed and livestock.
The mega salmon farms on the coasts of Norway, Chile, Canada, Scotland, and Australia, for example, use salmon derived from a Norwegian public breeding programme. The programme drew on dozens of salmon populations collected from rivers to breed fast-growing and docile fish. With the high-yielding and genetically uniform salmon, production boomed, but the farms spread diseases and parasites with catastrophic impacts on wild salmon. The fish also require huge amounts of feed made of wild-caught fish sourced from West Africa and other shores, with severe impacts on ecosystems and food security there. Today, salmon breeding and farming is dominated by a few companies and Norway’s public breeding programme is owned by a German livestock genetics company, the EW Group.
Corporations also dominate the market for shrimp genetics in Asia, where industrial farming relies on uniform, high-yielding varieties grown in enclosed ponds in high densities and with lots of feed. These shrimp farms are highly vulnerable to disease and therefore require seed[2] certified as pathogen-free. Only a few companies from the livestock sector control this pathogen-free seed market. For instance, Hendrix Genetics of the Netherlands and Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand (CP) have a monopoly in Sri Lanka, with CP also dominating the market for feed. The same two companies control about 90% of the market in Indonesia. In China, two animal feed companies, Haid Group and Evergreen, are the dominant players in its shrimp seed market and are rapidly expanding overseas.
In Ecuador, the world’s top shrimp exporter, the situation is different. Big companies farm shrimp in large, open farms at low densities. To ensure disease-resistance, large populations of shrimp are exposed to pathogens and those that survive are selected for the next production cycle. Shrimp selection has become more intensive and high-tech over the years, and there are some specialist breeding companies, but breeding in Ecuador is still mainly done by the big shrimp farming companies for their own farms.
Industrial aquaculture is a young industry compared to industrial agriculture and livestock, but it follows the same logic of capitalism—either grow or “get eaten” by larger companies—and control over genes is the new frontier in this multi-billion dollar business.
[1] Pacific Sea Garden Collective (2022). Sea Gardens Across the Pacific: Reawakening Ancestral Mariculture Innovations. Version 1. Washington Sea Grant at the University of Washington.
[2] Young shrimp (post-larvae) used to stock farming ponds.