In a Massachusetts fish farm, from the moment the barramundi are hatched, from eggs barely one-hundredth of an inch long to the day they're sold, they never swim in a river or sea, never hunt for food, never feel the tug of a fishing line. "We're producing great-quality fish without harming the oceans or anything else," Goldman says of his operation, Australis Aquaculture. His barramundi aren't caught; they're manufactured. And factories like these might represent the last, best chance for fish to have a future.
"The wild stocks are not going to keep up," says Stephen Hall, director general of the WorldFish Center. "Something else has to fill that gap."
Something else already does: aquaculture. Humans have been raising some fish in farms for almost as long as we've been fishing, beginning with Chinese fishponds 4,000 years ago. But it's only in the past 50 years that aquaculture has become a true industry. Global aquacultural production increased from less than 1 million tons in 1950 to 52.5 million tons in 2008, and over the past few decades, aquaculture has grown faster than any other form of food production. Today about half the seafood consumed around the world comes from farms, and with the projected rise in global seafood consumption, that proportion will surely increase. Without aquaculture, the pressure to overfish the oceans would be even greater. "It's no longer a question about whether aquaculture is something we should or shouldn't embrace," says Ned Daly, senior projects adviser at the Seafood Choices Alliance. "It's here. The question is how we'll do it."
Read the complete article from Time.