It takes a sardine to raise a village

If you enjoy the taste of sardines, eating them can now be considered a political statement.  By choosing to eat these small “pelagic” inhabitants of the lower end of the food chain, one is rejecting farmed fish, which often consume large quantities of the world’s sardines, anchovies, herring, and other small, wild fish, in the form of aquaculture feed from factory fish farms.  Perhaps, calling sardine consumption activism is a bit exaggerated, but it might help explain the delicate relationship between ocean aquaculture and overall global food security.

Catching small, wild fish to make a commercial diet for farmed fish can be detrimental to small-scale fishing communities around the world. Photo by Anna H-G

Catching small, wild fish to make a commercial diet for farmed fish can be detrimental to small-scale fishing communities around the world, and it significantly impacts people in developing countries who depend on these fish as their primary source of inexpensive protein and essential nutrients.

It can take about 2 – 6 pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of certain ocean-farmed fish.  This means that while offshore aquaculture supporters insist that the industry will be the answer to feeding the world’s hungry, in reality it may very well contribute to emptying the oceans of our wild fish to produce a smaller number of farmed fish that will only feed those who can afford a pricey product.

There are other ways that factory fish farms threaten global food security. We need to take action to stop expansion of offshore aquaculture to protect our oceans and prevent companies from turning our marine environment into an industrialized factory fish farm.

There are better forms of aquaculture that we can use to supplement wild catch, such as responsible production of certain types of shellfish (mussels) and land-based recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) which can be better for the environment and regional economies.

Senator David Vitter (R-LA) has introduced a bill to ban development of industrial ocean fish farming in U.S. federal waters (typically three to 200 miles off the coast) for up to three and a half years. This would give us a chance to accurately assess the real impacts from factory fish farms.

So, eat a sardine if you’d like to make a statement. And, if you want to take an even bigger stance against factory fish farms to help affect policy-level change, ask your Senator to support Vitter’s bill.

-Harley Stokes & Rich Bindell