Fish farming and the law of unintended consequences
On Tuesday, February 25th, the Department of Environmental Health hosted a film screening of the award-winning documentary, Until the End of the World, which examines the environmental and community impacts of fish farming. The screening was followed by a panel discussion and lively Q&A featuring filmmaker Francesco De Augustinis, as well as Alessandro Bocconcelli, Matthew Hayek, Doug Frantz, and Catherine Collins, and moderated by Eva Douzinas, President of the Rauch Foundation.
Fish farming is the fastest growing sector of food production, often described as the sustainable answer for food security. Aquaculture attracts billions in public and private investment, which has led to the growth and expansion of fish farming projects in countries like Greece, Chile, and Argentina, with impacts to oceans felt in places as far away as Senegal and Antartica.
Petros Koutrakis, Professor of Environmental Health, introduced the film, drawing a parallel between the rise of industrial agriculture in the last century, and this century’s growth of aquaculture.
“We understand that it is a great challenge to feed over 8 billion people, but we cannot do it at the expense of the environment,” said Koutrakis. “Food production systems must cause minimum damage to the environment and human health.”
“There is often a disconnect between how people perceive aquaculture and the realities of its global impact, particularly regarding how much feed is required to produce salmon, sea bass, and other carnivorous fish, as well as the impact of these open-net fish farms on local ecosystems,” said Eva Douzinas, president of the Rauch Foundation which co-sponsored the event. “Discussions like this one at Harvard, which highlight the human impact via the documentary, and bring together experts on nutrition and the environment, are so important for driving progress and identifying areas in need of greater research and understanding.”
Today, fish farming — also referred to as aquaculture — is the fastest expanding food production sector globally. By 2021, the amount of farmed fish globally exceeded the amount of caught fish. Exact numbers when it comes to fish are practically impossible to secure, but it’s estimated that between 40-120 billion fish are farmed every year globally for an annual production of 122.6 million tons, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 2022. “If we go back 30 years ago, aquaculture did not have a production level so high,” explains Alessandro Lovatelli, FAO Aquaculture Officer, in the film, adding, “In the last three decades it has been going up steadily.”
Starting with sea bass and sea bream farms in Italy, Greece, and Spain, the documentary shows how fish farm pollution of natural paradises is transforming them into dead zones, not to mention the destruction of small local economies. We see the paradoxical competition of this industry versus the livelihoods of entire communities in vulnerable areas, to produce high-end products like salmon.
In many parts of the film, the word “colonialism” recurs, revealing an industry that is transforming portions of the sea into so-called ‘productive areas’, and relies on enormous quantities of pelagic fish such as sardines, anchovies and mackerel for processing into feed.
“Originally the fishmeal factories had the function of taking fishing waste, and processing it. But there is no more waste to be exploited because fish is scarce, and species that were not consumed before, are also consumed now,” explains Moussa Mbengue Adepa, a spokesperson for the traditional fishery association in Dakar, Senegal, West Africa. “So the fishmeal factories no longer transform byproducts, but are fed with small pelagic fish. But it takes 5kg of pelagic fish to produce 1kg of meal, you can see the ratio yourself.” So instead of feeding the local population, this fish is now used to create feed for fish farming that serves growing markets in Europe, Asia, and the United States.
To put this in context, Greenpeace Africa and Changing Markets Foundation estimate that 33 million people in West Africa could be fed each year with 0.5 million tons of fish that are exported and made into FMFO (fishmeal and fish oil). Serious questions are increasingly being asked about the ethical, as well as environmental and biodiversity, impacts of reducing small pelagic fish into fishmeal in countries like Senegal for transporting to farms feeding European and North American consumers demanding bass, bream or salmon.
This devastation of the local fish populations are having the dual effect of putting local fishermen out of work while also taking away a mainstay of the local population’s diets.
Alessandro Bocconcelli, Oceanographer emeritus of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and co-founder of Centinela Patagonia in Chile, spoke on the panel after the film, and emphasized the need for much better regulation and oversight in the aquaculture industry. He likened fish farming in Chile to the “Wild West” with the industry charged with monitoring themselves and leading to growing environmental disasters.
Alessandro explained that because there are no villages near to where the fish farms are located off the Chilean coast, so the workers just live on barges next to the farms. “All the sewage from the barge goes inside this fish farm. Everything gets dumped at sea. So there is a huge problem with plastic pollution, and everything that dies in the farm also gets dumped at sea. So, it’s just a total disaster.”
Walter Willett, Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard Chan, addressed the audience after the film and discussed the challenges of trying to find a healthy and sustainable way to feed 8 billion people. Willett has previously discussed the direct health benefits of consuming farmed salmon, and has argued that these benefits outweigh the risks.
Willett explained, “This is a really serious, difficult challenge … because we’re obviously not feeding people well today. And at the same time we’re destroying our environment. And then we’re going to add a couple billion more people by 2050.”
Willett added, “From a health standpoint it does look like having about 2 servings of fish per week is best. And again, we’re back to this challenge that we’re already overfishing in many areas. And yet we’re still not having 2 servings a week produced and consumed at present.”
But there have been some proposed solutions. Willett said, “It’s very clear that moving toward eating smaller fish, like sardines, and bivalves, such as mussels and clams could help meet this challenge”. He shared the recent work of colleague Chris Golden, who recently held a symposium on consumption of kelp and kelp farming, and integrating bivalves in kelp farming.
Another solution is to look for more plant-based sources of omega-3 fatty acids, but Willett highlighted that more research is needed in this area to determine if we can get the full health benefits of this essential long chain fatty acid by using plant-based sources such as canola or soybean oil.
“All of these things need to be done in a thoughtful, mindful, science-based way,” said Willett, in order to find the best way to provide people with more seafood in diets without leading to additional environmental and ecological destruction.
