China's aquaculture and the world's wild fisheries
Curbing demand for wild fish in aquafeeds is critical
Abstract
China is the world's largest producer, consumer, processor, and exporter of finfish and shellfish (defined here as “fish”), and its fish imports are steadily rising (1–3). China produces more than one-third of the global fish supply, largely from its ever-expanding aquaculture sector, as most of its domestic fisheries are overexploited (3–6). Aquaculture accounts for ∼72% of its reported domestic fish production, and China alone contributes >60% of global aquaculture volume and roughly half of global aquaculture value (1, 3).
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Science
Volume 347 | Issue 6218
9 January 2015
9 January 2015
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Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Published in print: 9 January 2015
Acknowledgments
We thank W. Falcon, D. Little, S.L. Dong, Y. Chen, Y.S. Qiu, A. Chiu, C. Fedor, and L. Seaman for input on the manuscript. We thank the China Fund of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and the Lenfest Ocean Program of the Pew Charitable Trusts for financial support, and the EU-FP7 Sustaining Ethical Aquaculture Trade (SEAT) project and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for support of our field surveys in China.
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RE: China's aquaculture and the world's wild fisheries
You write, "Here, we characterize and quantify the connections between China's aquaculture production and wild fisheries." You can't and didn't "characterize and quantify" a connection, because the purported connection doesn't really exist.
The word "connection" implies some real fundamental relationship between aquaculture and wild fisheries (in this case fish meal). Fish meal is just another "feed ingredient," along with everything from soybean meal to feather meal, that is used as a component in minimum cost animal/fish/shrimp diet formulations. It can be totally substituted for by other "feed ingredients." Therefore the relationship is only apparent through competing linear-programing models determining the least cost feed formulation for everything from pigs, chickens, dogs and cats to fish and shrimp. An accounting connection in a software model is not a relevant connection.
For example, corn gluten meal is a very high-quality protein source that can be used in carnivorous fish diets (lots of data for trout). However, the economic optimization software for chicken egg layers prefers that material, because it makes yellow yokes in the eggs. The economic optimization software for fish diets uses less of this ingredient that creates yellow fat from the pigment impurity in the meal. The linear programming models solve for minimum cost, subject to constraints requiring specific amino acid, fatty acids, carbs, vitamins, minerals, etc. required for each species.
We can make totally vegan diets that out-perform (both growth rate and food conversion efficiency: less than 1 kg of dry feed produces a kg of live fish) fish meal based control diets on marine carnivorous fish (white seabass). For most commercial aquaculture species, we know enough about their dietary requirements to formulate compound diets from the existing list of feed ingredients (all those things on your dog food label plus a thousand more well characterized possible ingredients) with or without fishmeal.
The worldwide fish meal production has been constant for 4 decades at maximum sustainable yield (MSY). During this time, the fish meal market has shifted from pig and chicken feeds to fish/shrimp feeds. In the 50's, we sometimes produced chicken or turkey that tasted like fish due to the fish meal used in their diet formulations. As a young man at the time, I recall gray-yoked eggs that tasted suspiciously like fish.
Anti-aquaculture activists, like the authors, have been beating this fish meal horse for over a decade, while this market shift was occurring. When aquaculture, with its rapid growth rate, started to push the price of fish meal up over a decade ago, research was done and alternatives were developed. This disconnected fish meal from aquaculture, as amounts of fish meal in the diets fell and plant breeders reduced and shifted around the carbohydrates in soybeans to make it a better fish food ingredient. Carnivorous fish utilize fats very well but have problems with certain carbonhydrates. The big differences between carnivorous and herbivorous fish lies not in the protein requirements but in lipid and carbohydrate metabolism.
It is past time for reviewers to start rejecting "junk science" which just provides cover for special interests . Better that SCIENCE devote its pages to real issues, such as climate change and overfishing the wild stocks of fish.