Saving Seafood

As aquaculture hits historic highs, let’s ensure sustainability is prioritized (commentary)

July 11, 2024 — Just two years ago, global consumption of aquatic animal foods soared to an estimated 165 million tons, growing at nearly twice the annual rate of the world population since 1961. Ensuring the sustainable and responsible production of aquatic foods should be standard practice. But how close are we to the mark?

The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) Report, published every two years by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, is a vital resource for understanding the current state of our fisheries and oceans and offers important insights into aquatic food production. The report’s credible methodology and the collaborative efforts of global experts who contribute to its findings play a crucial role in shaping policies and practices in the fisheries and aquaculture sectors.

The newly published 2024 edition of the SOFIA report highlights significant milestones. According to the FAO, world fisheries and aquaculture production has surged to an all-time high of 223.2 million tons, marking a 4.4% increase from 2020. And for the first time aquaculture production alone reached 94.4 million tons in 2022, overtaking traditional capture fisheries in its contribution to human consumption.

Read the full article at Mongabay

For the first time ever, we’re farming more seafood than we’re catching: FAO

July 9, 2024 — For the first time in history, we now farm more seafood than we catch from the wild. At the same time, overfishing of wild fish stocks continues to increase even as the number of sustainably fished stocks declines.

That’s according to the  U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) latest “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture” (SOFIA) report. The 2024 instalment of the report, a biennial collection of data that outlines the FAO’s vision for the fishing and aquaculture sectors, was released June 8 at a high-level ocean stakeholder event in Costa Rica. It tempers aquaculture progress with a warning that fisheries management is failing to adequately support sustainable wild fish stocks.

The report summarizes the FAO’s “Blue Transformation road map” and encourages countries to implement it. In 2021, the FAO launched the road map, a strategy for meeting the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14), Life Below Water, by 2030, to improve the social, economic and environmental sustainability of aquatic food and feed more people more equitably. Sustainably growing aquaculture and better managing fisheries are central to the Blue Transformation road map, but progress is “either moving much too slowly or has regressed,” the report says.

“The FAO’s ambition for a Blue Transformation is necessary, admirable and ambitious,” Bryce Stewart, a senior research fellow at the U.K.-based Marine Biological Association, told Mongabay. “It appears to have resulted in improved data and a higher profile for blue foods from fisheries and aquaculture as a key way to addressing global issues around inadequate nutrition and inequality.”

Read the full article at Mongabay

The UN says more aquatic animals were farmed than fished in 2022. That’s the first time in history

June 11, 2024 — The total global volume of fish, shrimp, clams and other aquatic animals that are harvested by farming has topped the amount fished in the wild from the world’s waters for the first time ever, the United Nations reported Friday.

The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, in its latest report on fisheries and aquaculture — or farming in water — says the global catch and harvest brought in more than 185 million tons of aquatic animals in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

Experts say the milestone in human history had been expected, as the hauls from fisheries have largely stagnated over the last three decades — largely because of limits in nature.

Read the full article at the The Associated Press

Fishing regulators need more transparency, ocean groups say

April 17, 2023 — Some regional fisheries management organizations that were set up by the United Nations to measure and conserve fish populations — but are difficult to hold to account — need to be more transparent about how they make their rules and regulations if fish species are to be protected and maintained for people reliant on healthy fish stocks for their livelihoods, conservation agencies and fishing industry players say.

The 50-some regional fisheries management organizations worldwide bring together local, coastal states and bigger international players to regulate how companies and countries can fish in waters worldwide in a way that best conserves populations of fish and other ocean species based on scientific evidence.

For years, these regional regulators have been accused of undemocratic practices that favor large, industrial fishers but now several conservation groups are banding together to renew calls for a culture change.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

100 states committed to the UN FAO’s Agreement on Port States Measures

November 21, 2022 — The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has increased commitment to its Agreement on Port States Measures (PSMA) by reaching 100 states committing to the agreement  to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

The FAO estimates that globally, one in every five fish caught annually is from IUU fishing. Combatting IUU fishing aids national, regional, and global efforts for sustainable fisheries and is part of achieving the U.N.’s sustainable development goals. The PSMA is an international agreement that denies port access to foreign vessels seeking entry to a port other than their own state.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Fishing Communities Step Up As World Hunger Threatens

July 15, 2022 — Today, motivated by a love of country, a connection with the ocean and those who live from it, Vasquez advocates for the fishing communities of Central America with nonprofit global environmental organization, “Rare.” The mid-sized NGO (FY2022 budget $32 million) is based in Arlington, Virginia. Grants from governments and foundations as well as contributions from individuals support Rare’s global staff of 178 with their environmental work, on both land and sea. This includes not only the time-tested work of grass roots organization, but also the scientific gathering and sharing of data about the state of waters, the creatures that live in them, and the families dependent upon a robust catch to provide food to their families and beyond.

All over Honduras, communities now need to mobilize to hold on to their coastal livelihoods in the face of not only climate pressures but also the impact of overfishing, great and small – from big commercial trawlers to local fishermen. Vasquez has been helping community groups there to organize and work with their government to produce outcomes that preserve their unique way of life, born of the link between ocean and culture.

he challenge is not peculiar to just Honduras or even just Central America. The U.N. this summer advanced its global “Blue Transformation” endeavor, to, as it says, “enhance the potential of food systems underwater and feed the world’s growing population sustainably.”

Rare says almost three billion people around the world rely on fish as a major source of protein. Indeed, the ascendance of fish as a significant food source is of critical importance, the World Food Programme reporting this month that global hunger is on the rise, with an estimated 828 million people in a state of hunger in 2021. In fact, the U.N.’s WFP has raised a red alert on rising global hunger due to the war in Ukraine, climate change, and pandemic and economic stresses.

Marine ecologist and nature photographer George Stoyle is the digital architect of Rare’s Fish Forever data pipeline of widely available aggregated data about ecosystems health, climate change resilience, fisheries production, household surveys, and, most contemporary, the impact of the Covid pandemic.

In England, a team of University of Cambridge scientists this summer identified what they see as fifteen of the top challenges to marine biodiversity. Enumerated in the Journal “Nature Ecology and Evolution,” they range from the impact of wildfires, resource exploitation, overfishing, ocean mining of several types, and of course rampant pollution.

On the immediate receiving end of these stresses are the constituents of Rare – buffeted in hurricanes, suffering through extreme heat and drought, casting lines in depleted waters. By extension, though, so are we all.

Read the full article at Forbes

 

Record-breaking seafood production must undergo a ‘blue transformation’: FAO

July 13 2022 — Nearly one in four people across the planet don’t have access to a nutritious diet. But the latest “State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture” report by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization outlines a “blue transformation” with the potential to take the edge off critical food security issues.

Aquaculture production hit a record-breaking 122.6 million metric tons in 2020, and has the potential to contribute more to human nutrition than it currently does, according to the report that the FAO released June 29 at the U.N. Ocean Conference in Lisbon. Sustainable aquaculture expansion and better fisheries management form the backbone of the report’s blue transformation vision, which aims to maximize global capacity to meet the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

The SOFIA report has been giving policymakers, scientists and civil society a deep dive into the global fisheries and aquaculture sectors since 1995. The flagship report, released every two years, reviews FAO and broader U.N. statistics, including those the FAO has been collecting on 500 fisheries stocks globally since 1974. It provides data, analysis and projections that inform decision-making internationally.

The new report brings in data that became available since the last SOFIA report was published, in 2020. According to it, more than 58 million people rely on direct employment in fisheries and aquaculture for their livelihoods. This figure leaps to 600 million when counting indirect workers and their dependents, Manuel Barange, director of the FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Division that produces the report, told a Lisbon press conference announcing the report’s release.

The U.N. estimates the global human population will reach 10.9 billion by the end of this century. “So the big question is: How are we going to feed so many people?” Chris Ninnes, CEO of the Netherlands and U.K.-based Aquaculture Stewardship Council, which oversees independent certification of farmed seafood products that pass environmental, social and labor standards, said to Mongabay.

Fresh off the back of the North Atlantic Seafood Forum that took place in Norway in late June, Shang said the seafood industry is looking “overwhelmingly” at the need to produce fish more sustainably. But the challenge is so vast that a lot more needs to be done to enable technologies to keep pace with global demand and a growing population, he said.

“This report reinforces why those factors matter,” he said. “Sustainability is the rising tide that lifts us all.”

Read the full story at Mongabay

JERRY FRASER: Don’t look up: 30×30 dusts off an old scapegoat

March 24, 2021 — It’s nice to know that among some in the science community, the threat of covid-19 is viewed as being on the wane.

Last week, the journal Nature postulated that “after a year of pandemic-induced delays, 2021 is set to be a big year for biodiversity, climate and the ocean.”

While I look forward to bidding good riddance to the pandemic, it’s hard to image that a “big year” for Nature’s editorial writers will be anything but a pain in the butt for commercial fisherman.

One reason for the excitement at Nature and elsewhere is the expectation that the advance of the 30×30 agenda, which calls for protecting 30 percent of the ocean by 2030, will resume.

In the words of the Pew Charitable Trusts, “The call for 30 percent marine protection is part of securing a healthy ocean where marine parks enhance fisheries and sound fisheries management enhances biodiversity conservation.”

If you’re wondering what a marine park is going to look like, it’s a stretch of ocean that will host recreational and indigenous fishermen, wind farms, ecotourism, and in some cases, oil wells. In rare instances, there could be a token commercial fishing vessel, its permits held by an NGO.

Read the full opinion piece at National Fisherman