By John Forster*
Aquacopia

America is engaged in yet another debate about aquaculture, this time prompted by the Administration’s National Offshore Aquaculture Act of 2007. The debate ranges over the usual topics from jobs and seafood imports to the environment and competition with commercial fishing. Missing from this debate, however, is discussion of an idea that reaches far beyond these usual battle lines and which merits more attention. It is an idea that was captured eloquently by the famous French ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau when he said in 1973 “With earth's burgeoning human populations to feed we must turn to the sea with new understanding and new technology. We must farm it as we farm the land.” Later, in 1979, Nobel laureate Odysseus Elytis expressed the same idea in a more abstract way when he said “The sea for us is something very familiar and not at all wild. It seems just another land demanding cultivation.

Through human history, though the sea has been a wild and often dangerous place, it has given generously of its natural bounty, which we have taken while putting nothing back. Fishing for food has sustained coastal communities through the ages and more recently has become the most global of our animal protein industries. More recently still, aquaculture has challenged the assumption that hunting for seafood is the only way to produce it and, as we look forward, it is appropriate to ask: will it become the dominant and even preferred way to produce it? If the answer is yes, as seems likely, we must then ask if our present methods of aquaculture are leading us in directions that make this possible.

First, therefore, is the idea sound? Can we, should we look to the oceans to provide more? Presently, they yield about 100 million metric tons of raw food material per year, compared to about 5.1 billion metric tons per year produced on land. Given that the oceans cover two thirds of the Earth’s surface, it seems reasonable to think that they might be managed to produce more.

Between 1968 and 1990 a program that became known as the U.S. Marine Biomass Program was one of the first serious attempts to test the idea [1]. It was conceived by Howard Wilcox who with others dreamt of ocean food and energy farms that would produce marine plant biomass that could then be processed, like terrestrial crops, into multiple food and energy products: in Cousteau’s words, ‘to farm the sea as we farm the land’. Given impetus by the first world oil crisis of the 1970’s, it became mostly a bioenergy project and was funded generously by the U.S. Department of Energy and related agencies. Chynoweth (2002) summarizes the work in considerable detail and describes how it eventually petered out as oil flowed freely again in the 1980’s and early 1990’s and a sense of crisis lapsed into complacency [2].

But it is hard to feel at ease with energy supplies or other trends in human consumption now. Be it carbon emissions, depleted aquifers, top soil erosion, burgeoning human populations, or the questionable logic of turning food in to fuel, there is a sense that the burden we impose on the land is now too heavy and, perhaps, the notion that we should turn to the sea for relief should be looked at again, in light of what has been learned in the intervening years about how it might be farmed.

Though logical and even compelling, the idea that some of the sea might become farms instead of wilderness is so offensive to some, especially in the USA, that they have resisted the development of marine aquaculture in the last 30 years every step of the way. If it was ever seriously suggested that, one day centuries from now, over 30 million square kilometers of the ocean’s surface might be allocated for farming, they would protest vigorously and conjure up images of huge corporate fish farms and devastation of traditional coastal economies and ways of life. Yet 30 million km² is about the same area as is presently farmed on land, where it represents about 20% of our terrestrial surface, compared to less than 10% of the ocean’s surface. If farmed at comparable levels of productivity to that achieved on land, it would double man’s food and fiber producing capacity. It would do this without the need for fresh water and possibly without fertilizer, if cost effective ways can be found to tap the nutrient rich ocean depths. Moreover, while the development of terrestrial agriculture mostly displaced verdant natural wildernesses, floating aquaculture may eventually be possible in ocean areas with little natural productivity, enhancement of which may be ecologically enriching as well as contributing to carbon sequestration. Of course, such a possibility is many years away but, given the challenges that now confront us, and given these huge potential benefits, surely it is not unreasonable to think that just 10% of ocean wilderness might, one day, be dedicated to this purpose?

The idea presumes a change in humankind’s relationship with the sea as we become farmers of it instead of hunters in what some refer to as the development of a ‘marine agronomy’. The U.S. can lead such change, or follow, but it will not stop it because economic and environmental imperatives elsewhere in the world are too strong, while the opportunities are too large to ignore. In Japan, for example, plans are being developed to begin a new marine biomass program that bears much resemblance to the original US program, except that now oil is $60 to $70 a barrel rather than $15 to $30 only a few years ago. In China and elsewhere in Asia farming of seaweeds for food and industrial uses has developed so that it dwarfs any natural harvest and at 13.9 million metric tons per year the global harvest is one of the world’s major aquacultural crops.

Presently, the debate in the U.S. is about the posible development of aquaculture in its Exclusive Economic Zone, a huge area of water that at 11.6 million km² is equivalent to about a third of the world’s entire farmland. It is a debate about finfish farming primarily and about environmental concerns that opponents claim justifies a precautionary approach. Leaving aside the argument that it might, in fact, be incautious to do nothing given the trends in human consumption, it prompts the second question posed earlier, namely, do our present attempts to farm at sea lead us in the direction of the longer term goal?

I believe they do. As we learn to farm fish and to work in the open sea, so we will develop the skills and infrastructure that will allow us to farm marine plants there in future. And, as we learn to feed carnivorous fish on terrestrially grown plant nutrients, so we will set the stage for them to be fed, one day, on plant nutrients produced at sea. In effect, today’s pioneering aquacultural efforts are just the beginning of the creation of a critical mass around which new developments can take place, some of them barely imaginable now.

It is easy to dismiss such notions as the ramblings of a tired old salmon farmer, which I am, but human progress and discovery have never followed straight lines. Nor have they ever come up with the perfect without starting with the imperfect. The key to progress, as it has always been, is to try, to risk failure and to learn from it. In a twenty first century capitalist democracy, that also means trying something that has a chance at the outset of making some money and, for now, that means growing something for which people will pay a price that justifies the costs, and that means high value finfish. If we can embrace that idea and build research programs around it that anticipate subsequent steps in the journey, there is a reasonably good chance that it will get us, eventually, to where we want to go.

Such thinking does not seem to figure much in the present American Aquaculture Debate. Perhaps, because it will take decades, even centuries to reach its full potential, it cannot overcome human impatience and political calculation. But it is an idea that is at the heart of what aquaculture should be about, and it is to be hoped that all the energy and talent that is presently concentrated on opposite sides of the debate might, sometime, find a way to step back from the war zone and to consider the long term importance of finding ways to make more productive use of the sea.

I began with two quotations; I will close with another, this one by John F. Kennedy who once said: “There are costs and risks to a course of action but they are far less than long range risks of comfortable inaction”. Spoken at a different time and in a different context his words are nonetheless apt in the present U.S. debate about aquaculture and the dilemma posed by the extraordinary success of the human species. The U.S. has been comfortably inactive in this field for far too long and it is time do something.

*Forster is an aquaculture consultant and adviser to Aquacopia .

Endnotes [1] Bird, K.T. and P.H. Benson eds 1987. Seaweed Cultivation for Renewable Resources. Elsevier, Amsterdam. [2] Chynoweth, D.P. 2002. Review of biomethane from marine biomass (DRAFT). www.agen.ufl.edu/~chyn/download/Publications_DC/Reports/marinefinal_FT.pdf Images [1] Courtesy Northern Aquaculture [2] From McGregor and Lockwood (1985).