Joint Statement: “FAO and its members must address the destructive impacts of industrial feedlot aquaculture” — Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements

JOINT STATEMENT

13 Civil Society and Small-scale fishing organisations (CSOs and SSF) sign a joint statement during the **13th Session of the FAO Subcommittee on Aquaculture,** a forum for consultation and discussion and advises the Committee on fisheries (COFI) on technical and policy matters on aquaculture.

The signatories of this statement call on FAO members to address the destructive impacts of industrial feedlot aquaculture.

Aquaculture is presented by the FAO as a production system that can mitigate declining wild fish catches while continuing to feed the planet’s growing population. However, the term “aquaculture” includes various production models – with a range of social and environmental costs and benefits. Some may be relatively environmentally benign when conducted at appropriate scale, such as small-scale, non-intensive, family/ community based fish farming and the extensive cultivation of algae, mussels, clams, and oysters, whilst others - notably intensive industrial feedlot aquaculture - incur significant environmentally and socially damaging impacts on coastal ecosystems and the communities that depend on them for their livelihoods all around the world.

Social and environmental and animal welfare impacts

Across the globe, the industrial model of feedlot aquaculture is displacing coastal small-scale fisheries, competing with them for space on land and in waters traditionally used for navigating and fishing, threatening their survival through the acquisition and privatisation of the coastal commons, and environmental degradation and pollution from farm waste.

The environmental impacts of this production model include eutrophication, causing increases in harmful algal blooms (including Red Tides), a negative impacts on seagrass meadows and other critical habitats due to the accumulation of organic matter around farms; massive escapes of fish into the wild and fish die-offs, use of harmful chemicals including pesticides and carcinogens and antibiotics polluting the water, creating dead zones on the sea bed underneath the farms, and posing risks to human health.

Intensive aquaculture can also be detrimental to animal welfare in the absence of regulations to enforce good practices during transport, rearing and at the time of slaughter. Fish, as animals, are recognised as sentient beings, and protected under various conventions including the draft UNCAHP and the provisions of Article 13 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU. Yet over 133 billion farmed finfish endure great suffering in fish farms and are killed with inhumane methods.

Attempts to farm new carnivorous sentient species such as cephalopods or Bluefin tuna, where high welfare standards could be impossible to meet, and where farming systems would be detrimental to the environment, local livelihoods and biodiversity, raise particular concerns.

Fattening farmed fish with wild-caught fish?

Furthermore, if aquaculture is supposed to mitigate the decline in wild fish catches while continuing to feed the growing global population, the intensive fish farming model is nonsensical. Farmed species such as salmon, sea bass, shrimp and prawns require high volumes of fishmeal and fish oil from wild-caught fish in their feed.

This, in turn, affects small scale fishing communities, notably in West Africa, the Baltic Sea, and many other places, whose livelihoods and food security are at risk from the depletion of wild-fish stocks to produce fish feed: the overfishing of small pelagics such as sardinella, sardines and mackerel for reduction to fishmeal and fish oil used to produce animal feed for industrial fish farms across the globe is endangering the future prospects of men and women all along the value chain who depend on small-scale fisheries.

Intensive industrial feedlot aquaculture takes fish and livelihoods away from local communities, especially in low-income countries, to feed fish in industrial feedlot aquaculture destined for consumption in wealthier nations. Aquaculture in Europe and Asia is particularly demanding on sourcing fish feed from West African fish. Over half a million tons of pelagic fish that could feed over 33 million people in the West Africa region are instead extracted from the ocean and reduced to fishmeal and fish oil, to feed farmed fish and livestock.

Conclusion

The current FAO strategy for aquaculture does not respond to the social and environmental challenges posed by this sector and fails to clearly define what “sustainable” aquaculture is. Such indiscriminate support to all forms of aquaculture is not coherent or compatible with the FAO’s policy goals to achieve sustainable food systems that are productive, resilient, and equitable.

We call on FAO and its members to adopt a coherent approach to sustainable “blue foods” systems governance that aligns with an ecosystems based approach, animal welfare and social equity. This entails preventing the development of mass production of seafood through industrial feedlot aquaculture without consideration for the environment, local communities, or to animal welfare and placing small-scale, low-impact aquaculture, fishers and fishworkers, as well as small-scale fish producers, processors and traders at the heart of their food policy.