Issues > November/December 2003 (#99) > Matters of Scale: Factory Fish-Farming

Matters of Scale: Factory Fish-Farming

by World Watch Magazine

At the start of the twentieth century, Pacific salmon were nearly wiped out by a canning industry that laid traps across the mouths of rivers to catch every fish returning to spawn. Now, at the start of the twenty-first, wild Atlantic salmon are nearly extinct and the aquaculture industry is placing new pressures on wild Pacific salmon as weaker, farmed animals escape and eat up food supplies. What sounded like a way to feed the world healthy, low-fat meat has turned out, as these facts show, to be a fine kettle of fish indeed. Reprinted with permission from World Watch Magazine, September/October 2003.

Number of different algaecides, herbicides, pesticides, and other chemical additives normally fed to farm-raised salmon in 1989

 

  

3

 

Number being used in 2000

 

  

26

 

Time it takes, in a catfish pond producing 5,000 kilograms of fish per year, to drop 10 tons of waste into the water

 

  

1 year

 

Average period of time a pond is used in raising catfish for human consumption, before draining and refilling with fresh water

 

  

6 years

 

PCB concentrations found in wild salmon, in a recent study, in pg/g

 

  

5,302

 

PCB concentrations found in farmed salmon

 

  

51,216

 

Percentage of global production of fish and seafood coming from aquaculture in 1970

 

  

3.9

 

Percentage coming from aquaculture in 2000

 

  

27.3

 

Estimated amount of beef produced, worldwide, in 2002, in metric tons

 

  

49,700,000

 

Estimated amount of farmed fish produced in 2002

 

  

52,700,000

 
Prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in chickens in Denmark prior to a ban on routine use of antibiotics in chicken production   82 percent
Prevalence three years after the ban   12 percent

•         •         •         •

 

Reprinted from World Watch Magazine, September/October 2003

SOURCES: Chemical additives: National Warmwater Aquaculture Center, Mississippi State University, and www.animalaid.org.uk; Catfish waste: Craig S. Tucker and John A. Hargreave, “Effluents for Channel Catfish Aquaculture Ponds,” Mississippi State University, 1998; PCBs in salmon: Chemosphere, Vol. 46(7), 2002; production percentages: www.fishfarming.com; beef production: USDA; farmed fish production: extrapolated from Fisheries Department, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

 

Worldwatch is an independent research organization that works for an environmentally sustainable and socially just society. For more information, visit them on the web at www.worldwatch.org.

For Your Community | posted November 26, 2003