ESSAY

MARK
BITTMAN

According to many scientists, most of the fish we’ll be eating will be farmed, and by midcentury, it might be easier to catch our favorite wild fish ourselves rather than buy it in the market.

But we overfished species like flounder and tuna to the point that it now takes more work, more energy, more equipment, more money to catch the same amount of fish - roughly 77 million metric tons a year, a yield that has remained mostly stagnant for the last decade after rapid growth and despite increasing demand.

Still, plenty of scientists say a turnaround is possible. Studies have found that even declining species can quickly recover if fisheries are managed well. It would help if the world’s wealthiest fish-eaters would broaden their appetites. Mackerel, anyone?

It will be a considerable undertaking nonetheless. Global consumption of fish, both wild and farm raised, has doubled since 1973, and 90 percent of this increase has come in developing countries.

The result of this demand for wild fish, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, is that “the maximum wild-capture fisheries potential from the world’s oceans has probably been reached.
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One study, in 2006, concluded that if current fishing practices continue, the world’s major commercial stocks will collapse by 2048.

Already, the Mediterranean’s bluefin tuna population has been severely depleted, and commercial fishing quotas for the bluefin in the Mediterranean may be sharply curtailed. Most species of shark, Chilean sea bass, and the cod-like orange roughy are threatened.

Scientists have recently become concerned that smaller species of fish, the so-called forage fish like herring, mackerel, anchovies and sardines that are a crucial part of the ocean’s food chain, are also under siege.

These smaller fish are eaten not only by the endangered fish we love best, but also by many people throughout the world.

But the biggest consumers of these smaller fish are the agriculture and aquaculture industries. Nearly one-third of wild-caught fish are reduced to fish meal and fed to farmed fish and cattle and pigs. Aquaculture alone consumes an estimated 53 percent of the world’s fish meal and 87 percent of its fish oil.

“We’ve totally depleted the upper predator ranks; we have fished down the food web,’’ said Christopher Mann, a senior officer with the Pew Environmental Group, a conservation organization.

Industrial aquaculture is following the same pattern as land-based agriculture. Edible food is being used to grow animals rather than nourish people.

This is not to say that all aquaculture is bad. China accounts for an estimated 70 percent of the world’s aquaculture - where it is small in scale, focuses on herbivorous fish and is not only sustainable but environmentally sound.

“Throughout Asia, there are hundreds of thousands of small farmers making a living by farming fish,’’ said Barry Costa- Pierce, professor of fisheries at University of Rhode Island.

But industrial fish farming is a different story. The industry spends an estimated $1 billion a year on veterinary products; degrades the land (shrimp farming destroys mangroves, for example, a key protector from typhoons); pollutes local waters (according to a recent report by the Worldwatch Institute, a salmon farm with 200,000 fish releases nutrients and fecal matter roughly equivalent to as many as 60,000 people); and imperils wild populations that come in contact with farmed salmon.

If industrial aquaculture continues to grow, said Carl Safina, the president of Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group, “this wondrously varied component of our diet will go the way of land animals - get simplified, all look the same and generally become quite boring.”

Why bother with farm-raised salmon and its relatives- If the world’s wealthier fish-eaters began to appreciate wild sardines, herring and the like, we would be less inclined to feed them to salmon raised in fish farms. And we’d be helping restock the seas with larger species.

Which, surprisingly, is possible. As Mr.Safina noted, “The ocean has an incredible amount of productive capacity, and we could quite easily and simply stay within it by limiting fishing to what it can produce.’’

This sounds almost too good to be true, but with monitoring systems that reduce bycatch by as much as 60 percent and regulations providing fishermen with a stake in protecting the wild resource, it is happening.

“The message is optimism,” said David Festa, who directs the oceans program at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The latest data shows that well-managed fisheries are doing incredibly well. When we get the rules right the fisheries can recover, and if they’re not recovering, it means we have the rules wrong.”