Stratfor examines the evolution of the Aquaculture Industry in this good article. I think we will see more of this happening here in Panama.
Dietary trends come and go, but fish are generally considered a stable component of any healthy diet. Unsurprisingly, demand for fish products has outstripped the supply from wild catches over the past two decades. But a relatively new industry driven by this high level of demand is emerging: aquaculture.
Aquaculture is to water what agriculture is to land; it is the cultivation of aquatic organisms, such as fish or shellfish. As an industry, it has begun to fill the gap between supply and demand, adding a yield of 80 million tons per year to that of wild catches to reach a combined annual total of more than 180 million tons. Localized aquaculture is a very old industry in many parts of the world, well connected to local food supply chains. However, a vast increase in scale has created problems for global production chains as a whole.
Like any burgeoning industry, aquaculture still has a number of obstacles to overcome as it carves out its place in the global market. As in agriculture, there are growing concerns about aquaculture’s encroachment on natural habitats and use of antibiotics and feeds of questionable quality. However, unlike agriculture, which has had centuries to develop, aquaculture has not yet fully adjusted to meet a global market, and it lacks a robust and stable production chain. Essential feed components are still harvested far from low-cost seafood producers, who in turn are located continents away from high-end seafood consumers. The logistical challenges of connecting each of these links into a smoothly functioning global industry remain so daunting that aquaculture’s future, though promising, will also include many formidable challenges to overcome.
Nutritional Demand: From Fork to Fitness
There is a theory that the abundance of aquatic food in African lakes fuelled the spectacular increase in brain size during the evolution of Homo sapiens. From these early times, humans have found various ways to trap, corral and grow fish and seafood. In Southeast Asia and the Pacific, small-scale aquaculture has been part of local civilization and diet for centuries, with the emergence of seaweed farms and the cultivation of shellfish, shrimp and sea cucumbers. The industrialization of aquaculture, however, can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century, when the first commercial trout hatcheries arose. In the wake of the Second World War, nutritionists observed the remarkable health and longevity of Japanese and Mediterranean islanders. By comparison, autopsies of young American soldiers frequently revealed the ominous presence of early sclerotic plaques lining the arteries of the heart, a harbinger of heart attacks. It didn’t take long for nutritionists to pit the health benefits of fish against the dangers of red meat. The incredible fitness of the Inuit, who feed almost exclusively on sea animals, sealed the reputation of fish as a particularly healthy category of food.
When chemists began to analyze the nutrients in fish to pin down the compound making them so healthy, they quickly noted that fish contain a remarkably high proportion of long-chain omega-3 fats. Of these fats, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexanoic acid (DHA) became the hallmarks of nutritional fish products. EPA has been found to dampen the body’s inflammatory response, making it particularly beneficial for people with inflammatory diseases and some mental illnesses, while DHA has been found to be a crucial structural component in the membranes of the body’s most highly responsive cells, such as those in the brain and retina.
The search for pure sources of each of these fatty acids was on. Scientists discovered, patented and cultivated strains of algae that produced EPA or DHA, extracting their oils on an industrial scale. But high production costs ultimately led to a new search, this time for cheap methods of enriching the fatty acid content of existing foodstuffs. Two paths emerged: Scientists could either selectively cultivate existing crops to produce long-chain fatty acids, or they could find a way to raise livestock to metabolize more of the short-chain omega-3 fats found in feedstuff into long-chain variants.
One possible way to meet the first goal was to genetically modify crops, such as false flax, to include the algal genes that specialize in lengthening fatty acids. Though the initial results of experiments to do just that were promising, the controversy surrounding genetically modified organisms attaches a significant business risk to any effort to introduce such crops to large-scale markets. Alternatively, scientists could try to genetically engineer livestock to improve their bodies’ conversion of the short-chain fatty acids in feed to the sought-after, long-chain fats. The lure of this solution has proved hard to resist, and scientists have attempted to create variants of fish and pigs that have higher proportions of long-chain fatty acids in their meat, but it remains a long-term endeavor.
While efforts to find alternative sources of long-chain omega-3 fats are hastening, a number of recent clinical studies failed to consistently support the enthusiasm for healthy fish that has built up over the past few decades. It turns out that the benefits these fatty acids have for heart rhythms are not so clear-cut; the cognition and vision improvements in infants they are thought to cause have held true, but stem from more complicated factors than previously believed; their reduction of inflammation needs more study; and the protection they provide against common cancers has yet to be confirmed by larger clinical trials. Furthermore, the long-standing warnings against the dangers of red meat have come under sustained scientific critique. These trends could ultimately undermine fish’s position as a superior health food relative to other sources of protein.
Supplying Demand: From Farm to Fork
Since its beginning, farming has had an impact on the ecological balance of its surrounding environment. Over the centuries, agriculture has spread throughout a large percentage of the available land and, until a few decades ago, employed the majority of the world’s population. Although the gradual intensification of farming practices has, at times, surpassed the limits of sustainability, agriculture has managed to find an acceptable balance between its risks and benefits.
Aquaculture, on the other hand, is still in its relative infancy. Pristine aquatic territories have been overrun, practices are largely shortsighted, regulations often come too late and enforcement remains difficult. Though some places, such as the Scandinavian countries, have slowly begun to develop a socioeconomic contract that balances the economic benefits of aquaculture with its risks to surrounding communities, much of the rest of the world has not.
The effects of aquaculture practices can ripple throughout an ecological system. Consider, for a moment, the difficulty of finding appropriate feed for saltwater species, most of which are carnivorous, at least in their early stages. These larval fish hunt for prey that must fit into their very small mouths — prey that were a logistical nightmare to harvest in the early days of aquaculture. But the discovery of brine shrimp cysts offered an easy solution to this problem and set off a feverish rush to harvest more than 2,000 tons per year of the “brown gold.” The exploding demand put significant pressure on the biological integrity of the inland salt lakes where brine shrimp cysts can be found, some of which are extremely remote and were in pristine condition until the dawn of aquaculture.
The aquaculture industry is largely driven by consumer preferences for particular species of fish. To supplant supply from wild catches with reared fish, fish farmers need fish meal and fish oil to feed their stock, most of which comes from wild catches. Unpopular species of fish are often relegated to this secondary category of aquaculture feed, if not discarded at sea for their low value. For example, fish with bones that are difficult to discard are not highly sought after, and species with strong flavors can usually only be profitable in markets that have a cultural tradition of eating that fish. More neutrally flavored species, such as the Vietnam-raised Pangasius, have enjoyed a meteoric rise in Western markets.
Consumer preferences in cuts of fish can also impact the health benefits of seafood reaching the market. A recent rise in demand for ready-to-cook fillets emphasizes the muscular part of the fish, which contains notable amounts of healthy fats when it comes to fish like salmonoids — most other fish store their fatty acids elsewhere, such as their livers. So, perhaps counterintuitively, lean fish fillets actually carry fewer health benefits than fillets from fattier fish. Meanwhile, the parts of the fish containing the most healthy fats — the eyes, head and organs — are generally discarded, especially in modern Western-style cooking.
Finding Supply: From Open Water to Farm
Throughout the ascent of mankind, humans have had the good fortune of discovering many different land-based plants and animals that were amenable to domestication. Until much more recently, though, very few aquatic creatures had joined the ranks of systematically farmed crops and livestock.
While this has changed dramatically over the past three decades, the lack of full livestock domestication is yet another sign that aquaculture is still developing as an industry. The ability to manage every link in the biological production chain, from spawn to broodstock, is important for controlling desired features such as taste, appearance, size, feed conversion and resistance to disease. Since the plasticity of nature has its limits, it will likely take several more decades before we are able to do so, and longer still if we also seek to fully manage the life cycles of the organisms used for live feed. Until then, the various links in the chain connecting fish producers to consumers will remain vulnerable to repeated epidemics, lapses in disease resistance, natural variations in quality and availability of feeds, and unknown factors affecting growth performance.
Lessons Learned From Agriculture
Aquaculture, like many other emergent industries, must find a way to navigate the waters of a diverse global market as it solidifies and organizes the links in its production chain. Though the pace of its development will be constrained by nature’s ability to adjust to mankind’s aquacultural aims and methods, the lessons learned from tens of thousands of years of agriculture will help speed it along.