Opposite views among politicians, producers and fishermen at the last FAO summit, which celebrated the overtaking of fish farming over fishing.
Can aquaculture be a sustainable answer to feed the growing world population? The latest summit of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) dedicated to fisheries and aquaculture (COFI36) gave diametrically opposed answers to this question: on the one hand the FAO itself and the producing countries celebrated the dizzying increase in fish farming in the world as a great achievement; on the other hand, the delegations of small fishermen from different continents spoke of a predatory system, which is destroying and starving their territories and communities.
“An increasingly expanding global aquaculture sector is driving the supply of fish and fishery products to new records,” Qu Dongyu, the Director-General of FAO, said in a video message at the opening of the meeting held in Rome, at the headquarters of the UN agency Unite, from 8 to 12 July.
Dongyu in his speech underlined FAO’s strong supportive position towards the further development of this industry, which he defined as “of fundamental importance for consumers.”
According to a report published by the FAO (the latest edition of The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture), in 2022 global fish production hit a record 223.2 million tons, and for the first time the number of fish farmed exceeded the quantity of the global catch.
“Aquaculture overtaking fisheries to produce aquatic animals is a great achievement, we should congratulate it,” commented Xinzhong Liu, director general of the Chinese government’s fisheries directorate.
China is the world’s leading aquaculture producer: at 58.1 million tonnes, it accounted for approximately 60% of the world’s farmed seafood production in 2023, and continues to invest to grow this industry. “The Chinese government attaches great importance to aquaculture and spares no effort to promote its further development,” Liu said.
The FAO meeting in Rome was attended by delegations of small artisanal fishermen from several regions, who denounced how the increase in aquaculture is creating value-added products for the richest markets, impoverishing the local communities where farms proliferate.
“Small-scale fishing and the human rights of indigenous peoples are often violated, due to industrial fishing fleets and large aquaculture projects,” the small-scale fishermen groups who join the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty said in a joint statement. In the document, the groups of small fishermen expose agricultural land converted into areas for aquaculture, pollution of coasts and water basins, destruction of biodiversity hotspots, conflicts, misuse of fish resources for feed production.
“For the last 20 years, the government has been encouraging large-scale aquaculture,” Suman Kalyan Mandal, an artisanal fisherman from India’s east coast and spokesperson for the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fish Workers (WFF), told us. “The integrated production of agriculture and small fish farms is a traditional system of our culture, but when they encourage aquaculture, they above all encourage shrimp farming. So all the agricultural land is converted into shrimp farms,” Mandal said, speaking of communities deprived of their means of livelihood.
During the meeting in Rome, FAO presented the expected guidelines for sustainable aquaculture, the result of a long process which began in 2017 and involved the FAO and experts from the producing countries. The guidelines should also address the many issues raised by the coastal communities.
“The guidelines recognize that countries have different challenges, needs and capacities in developing aquaculture,” said Raphaël Goulet, representative of the European Commission’s Directorate for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG-MARE). “Although they are not mandatory, the FAO guidelines will be a key reference point,” Goulet said, citing as an example the document’s recommendation to involve more women in fish farming-related employment.
Small fishermen’s associations criticized the guidelines. A source who followed the decision-making process that led to the drafting of the document described an “opaque” process, without participation, led by aquaculture producing countries, where the only information that leaked out were provisional drafts of the document.
A particularly controversial point of the guidelines concerns the use of wild fish for the production of feed, intended for breeding carnivorous fish with high added value, such as salmon, sea bass, sea bream, tuna and shrimp. To date, it is estimated that around 20 million tonnes of fish caught every year are destined for purposes other than human consumption, mainly for the production of feed.
“We need to understand what we mean by sustainability?,” Gaoussou Gueye, the senegalese president of the African Confederation for Artisanal Fisheries (Caopa), told us. “We have proposed an aquaculture that is not based on fishmeal, ” said Gueye. “We cannot protect the oceans and fish resources and at the same time accelerate the exploitation of fish to produce fishmeal to feed farmed fish.”
Despite the many requests to FAO to exclude the farming of carnivorous fish from production deemed “sustainable”, on this aspect the guidelines only recommend that producing States avoid or, when not possible, “minimize the negative impacts on life, food safety and the environment” linked to the supply of marine resources to produce feed. The guidelines also recommend the states to ensure that the wild fish used to produce feeds “come from sustainable fisheries.” The document does not refer at all to the sustainability of soy, which is also used in large quantities as protein ingredient in the feeds for aquaculture.
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