Amid rising prices of food and concerns over future shortages, fish farming has been a bright spot in the generally challenging outlook for global food production. This is why Singapore and many other Asian countries are so interested in aquaculture.
In the past, most fish were caught in the wild. However in recent decades, a rapidly growing volume and range of fish have been raised in tanks and ponds on land, or in cages and nets in oceans, lakes and rivers, helping to meet the growing demand for protein. Aquaculture is now a US$100 billion (S$127 billion) industry.
Asia has led the way in the production and export of both wild capture and farmed fish, making an increasingly important contribution to the region’s food security, while providing expanded employment opportunities and alleviating poverty.
South-east Asia accounts for one-quarter of all fish farmed for human consumption in Asia. Worldwide, fisheries support the livelihoods of about 540 million people, or about 8 per cent of the population.
But the most striking development has been in fish farming. The latest estimate from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is that aquaculture will meet more than half of all food fish consumption by next year.
Most traditional wild fisheries are being overexploited, or harvested at the maximum yield at which their stocks can be sustained. So fish farming is seen as a key way to increase supply in a world hungry for protein.
The growing supply of affordable fish in Asia has contributed to rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, and thus to economic growth.
Global production of food fish from aquaculture, including fin fishes, crustaceans, molluscs and other aquatic animals, reached nearly 53 million tonnes in 2008, according to the FAO’s annual report on the state of world fisheries, published last week. In 1950, production was less than one million tonnes a year.
As demand grew and technology improved, aquacultural output rose at an average annual rate of 8.3 per cent between 1970 and 2008, while the world population increased much more slowly, at just 1.6 per cent a year.
Aquacultural production has been growing at three times the rate of world meat production since 1950.
In China, the world’s largest fish farmer, just over 80 per cent of fish consumed by humans in 2008 was from aquaculture, up from 24 per cent in 1970. Asia as a whole accounts for nearly 90 per cent of global production from fish farming and over three-quarters of its value.
Of the 15 leading producers, 11 are Asian economies. The top six are all in Asia. While China is by far the biggest, it is followed by India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh.
The expansion of fish farming in Asia has been impressive. But will it continue?
The Global Aquaculture Alliance, a trade association, says that output must double in the next 10 years to keep pace with demand, particularly from a growing middle class in Asia and other parts of the developing world.
Ideally, as fish farming expands, it should provide breathing space for wild fisheries to recover.
Said Mr Alfred Schumm, a fisheries specialist with conservation group World Wide Fund for Nature: ‘In a world likely to face a future of increasing food prices and decreasing food security, it is becoming more and more apparent that running down one fishery after another is a disaster in the making.’
The FAO report found that the proportion of marine fish stocks estimated to be underexploited or moderately exploited declined from 40 per cent in the mid-1970s to 15 per cent in 2008, whereas the ratio of overexploited, depleted or recovering stocks increased from 10 per cent in 1974 to 32 per cent in 2008.
The proportion of fully exploited stocks has remained relatively stable, at about 50 per cent of the total since the 1970s.
Said senior FAO fisheries expert Richard Grainger, one of the report’s editors: ‘That there has been no improvement in the status of stocks is a matter of great concern. The percentage of overexploitation needs to go down, although at least we seem to be reaching a plateau.’
Aquaculture is not as separate from wild fishing as it may seem. This is because wild fish are widely used to make the fish meal and fish-oil components for feeding farmed fish.
The availability and high cost of feed is one of the constraints of future aquacultural expansion. Pollution and environmental degradation are some problems.
So, too, is the shortage of land, fresh water and suitable baby wild fish to build stocks of farmed fish.
Meanwhile, in South-east Asia, the trend in fish farming is to go offshore, because most countries in the region have extensive coastlines. As a result, mariculture, the cultivation of marine organisms for food and other products, has become the fastest-growing part of the business.
The writer is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies.
