Navigating the Complex Waters of Sustainable Aquaculture

Not long after agriculture was domesticated, aquaculture emerged. This multi-billion-dollar industry is expanding to meet growing demand. Dominated by Asian countries, aquaculture production threatens Blue Carbon Zones from Chile to Egypt, Australia to Mexico. In Part I of this episode, Jorden and Kimberly consider how aquaculture is a threat to the planet, but can be the key to sustainable freshwater and saltwater food production.

Key Topics Jorden and Kimberly discuss include

• How to save a fishing industry from total collapse

• Why not all farmed fish is spawned equally

• How a Japanese university beat the odds on tuna ranching

• Why the sustainability issues aquaculture faces aren’t far from those for agriculture

• Why aquaculture might be the best way to promote ocean and freshwater conservation

Recommended Resources

• The FAO’s 2024 Report on the aquaculture industry

• Global aquaculture production statistics

• Africa’s aquaculture leader, interestingly, in a 2025 Foreign Service Report by the US Dept. of Agriculture

• Kimberly’s Substack newsletter post

Sustainable aquaculture production uses integrated methods, combining fish, aquatic plants, rice, and waterfowl

Episode Transcript

KIMBERLY

Welcome to this episode of Sustainable Planet. I'm political scientist, Kimber Luer, and my co -host is Jordan Dye, a guy who knows an awful lot about sustainability issues. Though aquaculture hasn't been around for quite as long as domestication of plants and animals, which happened about 10 ,000 years ago, it wasn't far behind, only by about 2 ,000 years. Jordan, what's your take on the sustainability of aquaculture? Is it a more sustainable way to conserve and consume sea life, do you think?

JORDEN

I think it really depends on what we're focusing for the sustainability issue. You know, wild fishing has led to the collapse of fish stocks around the world and particular issues. You know, in Canada, the quintessential example is cod, the Atlantic cod industry. And wild fishing of that was a major industry in Canada in, you know, up till 1952. I pulled some awesome stats because I can't, I'm a Canadian. I had to talk about cod to start this off.

KIMBERLY

I always associate salmon with Canada. I don't know. I mean, cod just I mean, but I get that now that whole sort of Atlantic coast, right? It's a West Coast,

JORDEN

It's a West Coast, East Coast thing. Salmon on the West, cod on the East. So in 1952, Canada was pulling out 265 ,000 tons of cod. It took almost 100 years between the 1800s and 1900s to double from 100 ,000 tons to 200 ,000 tons. So really slow, sustainable growth. But then in that next 100 year period, the cod catches collapsed. So you start off 1900 at 200 ,000 tons per year being pulled out and going into the 2000s and still to today, where we average only eight to 13 ,000 tons. And I think that this is a great illustration of the sustainability challenges of wild fishing. And really, it comes down to a 10 -year period. 1958 to 68, Canadian cod industry went from 200 ,000 tons to over 800 ,000 tons pulled annually in that 10 -year period. From the government's perspective in the industry, they thought this was a boom. They thought this was amazing and drive fortunes in Atlanta, Canada. It all went away overnight, essentially. You know, between 1968 and into the 90s, you watch that graph just drop down into those 20 ,000s. And it actually led the Canadian government in 1992 to put a moratorium on cod fishing. Now, for anybody who works in a concentrated regional industry, you can imagine a government stepping in and saying, no, it's just done. But that's because it was a choice of do we save the last couple thousand cod that are in this region to try to rebuild or do we let it all just go away? And the impact of that has played out in the lives of Atlantic Canadian fishermen for the last now going on 30 years. And so I really look at this as what are we trying to protect when we're talking about aquaculture versus wild fishery? And so while there's issues with aquaculture that we're going to get into. I think that you see the rise of it in a large degree because wild fishing for our population levels was never going to be able to be sustainable, either on an environmental metric or on that kind of economic metrics, right? Because it's not just Canada. You have Atlantic cod, Pacific salmon, bluefin tuna. All of these stocks are facing either collapse or near collapse around the world.

KIMBERLY

So for me, what I think of always is tuna stocks, because that's one of those that. with especially the increase in the rise of the popularity of sushi around the world and sashimi, right? Japanese foods and restaurants. I was in Poland and there was a whole in Krakow, there was a whole entire strip of sushi restaurants and like Krakow is not even near the ocean. So it is like some, so to me, this is a really strange. When you start thinking about the fact that, for your instance with COD, is the Canadian government could actually step in and say, OK, we're just going to put a ban on this. But tuna is migratory. So no world government was able to, no countries were able to get together and say, OK, we're going to ban tuna. And so instead, what ends up happening, you have regional cooperative organizations trying to control tuna. extraction and through quotas and and all sorts of different systems rates to catch and management systems and that's something that has actually proven somewhat effective in some places in the world but because of that threat one thing that did happen in response to that was tuna ranching which is basically the equivalent of what we think of is as aquaculture in terms of along I guess I mean like it's all sort of the same thing when it comes down to it when we talk about aquaculture it can be ranching the difference between ranching and aquaculture is that with with the aquaculture itself that's much more of starting stocks from spawn and actually raising them then in that environment whereas the ranching is actually basically going out and lassoing up and collecting fish that are already out there in the wild and fattening them up then to send them to market so but that's still all part of the same part and parcel is that the fact of the matter is is that tuna were not actually getting big enough fast enough in nature so they so they said well we can circumvent this problem by ranching these tuna you know and i think so right and to your point about sushi everywhere

JORDEN

know and i think so right and to your point about sushi everywhere So much of this is driven by fads, I think. And we've seen it on a number of episodes we've done, you know, from avocados, the popularity explosion to the popularity of tuna and sashimi. And I know in the last decade, there's been a major effort to get people to think of yellowfin tuna as just as good as bluefin tuna and trying to shift those consumer preferences. And it's always interesting to me when you're looking at it from a system level, right? And like, oh, if we just shift this over here, we can minimize damage. But really, when it comes down to that cultural aspect, there's no way to predict what is going to drive that. Right. I think some of the best in this has been the ocean wise, the marketing campaigns and really getting people to understand that, hey, the option rate below is better for the environment. Tastes good. You maybe you don't have to go for that one that you've heard all about. But Chilean sea bass was another one that was big sort of fatty thing.

KIMBERLY

sea bass was another one that was big sort of fatty thing. And then. The actual chefs of restaurants started saying, hey, you know, we're going to act. These are being fished into extinction. We need to shift what it is that we're sending selling on menus. I actually saw this when I was working in restaurants in the 2010s going through university was the rise of tilapia as a fish alternative,

JORDEN

actually saw this when I was working in restaurants in the 2010s going through university was the rise of tilapia as a fish alternative, a great white flaky fish. Right. And the cost of it being so dramatically lower and then really was pushed out into restaurants. So you had a bunch of. You know, I was trying to think, OK, well, this is kind of like white cod. This is like this. What do we do with it? Right.

KIMBERLY

Yeah. And so when we talk about aquaculture, this is really considered an alternative to wild caught fishing of any sort of wild caught fishing practices. And it was actually first recorded in China in 4000 B .C. And I always tended to think of aquaculture as kind of happening along coastlines. But in fact, freshwater fishing farming dates back almost as far as the marine. the marine fishing and i just sort of thought you know like we're talking about 4 000 bce people like there was probably more than enough fish for everybody to go around right but but nonetheless this was they domesticated these practices and actually then made sure that they had constant food supplies in the same way that that farming and and as animal husbandry was domesticated

JORDEN

Yeah. And you mentioned, you know, fish, salmon in Canada. It's great. I've been very fortunate to grow up with fish in many forms in my life from, you know, northern BC, fishing with my grandpa, catching Dolly Parton. I love that name of that fish. To my first actual experience with aquaculture was in Alberta here. A family friend had a couple acres of land and in their retirement decided to build a rainbow trout hatchery. So they had a full enclosed garage spawning and hatchery system that they would stock two or three ponds to grow through the and raise them over the years. And then the family and friends would fish in the final pond and they knew how much they roughly had and how much you could pull out a year. And that was my first experience with it. And then. From that as a young kid seeing that to kind of seeing some of these industrial scale aquacultures, it really is a drastic difference. And I think as we get into some of the methods here, I think that's what's going to really come out for people is it's not equal across the board.

KIMBERLY

And when we talk about just how big this industry is for aquaculture, global production reached 130 .9 million tons value that... 312 .8 billion us dollars in 2022 we're talking about 223 million tons of animals and also the thing that always like gets sort of left out behind when talking about aquaculture reading about it is the fact that also there was almost 400 sorry not 400 40 million tons of algae as well and so that's also something we talked about this in previous episodes with with alternative packaging and algae being one of those substances. So there's, I mean, that also with seaweeds and so forth, because there is demand, increased demand for seaweed because it's so nutritious. But also when we start talking about increasing in aquaculture, then this is also fish food.

JORDEN

Yes, no, it's a great point. One thing I found really interesting about the rise of aquaculture is I didn't realize before we started digging in for this episode that aquaculture actually reached parity in 2012 with wild fishing and then surpassed it in 2013. And so every year since then, we've just seen the amount of fish annually produced in the globe disproportionately now starting to slide over to the aquaculture, which. I didn't realize we were that far down the path of this being the driver of global fish supply.

KIMBERLY

And when you think about the fact that a lot of people around the world settle near water and then also factor in the freshwater aquaculture practices, that sort of makes sense.

JORDEN

Yeah. So talking about the types of practices, did you have one that was the most interesting for you or the one that grabbed your attention when you started looking into it? No.

JORDEN

For me, the one that I... That's a straight up answer,

KIMBERLY

that I... That's a straight up answer, right? Yeah, I know. My students, I'm not going to lie to you. Like, if I don't know something, I'm just going to not, like they're going to try to pull one over on you.

JORDEN

For me, I will say one of the ones that I thought was interesting when I started diving into it was pond aquaculture. Because a lot of the sustainability challenges that I immediately think of with aquaculture are on the pollution side from the pens and in open bodies of water. And so pond aquaculture, that sounds great, was kind of my like, hey, maybe this smaller scale, this could be done. And immediately hit the fact that it's 30 ,000 tons of water consumed for one to two tons of fish. And so it was one of those like looks good. And there was many articles on how this should be more land based thing and quickly hit the wall of we could not produce the amount of, again, going back to the 130 million tons produced annually. We couldn't do that. And, you know, for listeners who are just coming off our freshwater episode, I don't think 30 ,000 tons per one to two tons of fish is going to be a sustainable option.

KIMBERLY

And this is the problem we run into with any sort of food production that goes higher up on the food chain scale. Because you're taking whatever calories and whatever inputs need to go into to raise and harvest this food, for lack of a better word, I guess, what we need to go into this. And are those resources really worth the trade -off?

JORDEN

Mm -hmm.

KIMBERLY

Same for, I mean, when we go all the way up to livestock, right? Like how many, how many pounds of beef are you going to get for the amount of water and the amount of land and everything that goes into the feed and the antibiotics and so forth that go into that? Is it really worth the trade -off?

JORDEN

A hundred percent. And, you know, and for listeners, you know, even, so both wild caught and aqualulture, interestingly enough, wild caught, less emission intensive. I didn't. I didn't know where that was going to land as I was thinking about it, because you have all the inputs on the raised, but then you think about the giant diesel engines and the marine fuel that goes on the fish. I thought it would actually be closer, but wild caught is significantly better. But regardless, if you're looking at a meat protein source, fish in general, for both amount of calories and protein, far, far, and then on the CO2 side, far, far better than lamb, beef, and any of the traditional meat sources we typically think of.

KIMBERLY

Yeah, definitely. The further you get up on the food chain, it's just going to get worse and worse and worse. That's why being a vegan is the best.

JORDEN

That's a trap. I'm going to keep coming. You know, it's the Alberta farmer in me can never get too far past a little beef in my life, sadly. I grew up in Pennsylvania dairy land where all the farmers,

KIMBERLY

I grew up in Pennsylvania dairy land where all the farmers, all of the people who were farmers around where I grew up all sold their milk to Hershey's.

JORDEN

Oh, wow. Yeah. So I didn't even get to enjoy that amazing fresh.

KIMBERLY

I wasn't a vegan yet. One of the things that I thought was really interesting in looking at this is where the top producers were around the world. I was actually surprised that China, I don't know why this surprised me, because China seems to be the top producer for an awful lot of things. But China, like by far, is the biggest aquaculture producer in the world. 67 million metric tons in 2024. And that was like over 60 % of the world's aquaculture production. India was second and they were not anywhere close. 16, a mere 16 million tons. by comparison to the 67 million metric tons of China. And so that, another thing though, I saw a different source actually ranked Indonesia second, but that also included seaweed production. So that was overall aquaculture, whereas for India was just fish. And also going back to tilapia, that was something that I remember because I'm older than you, Jordan. I'm older than Jordan, big surprise. The tilapia that I remember when that was a big thing that suddenly and reading about tilapia production and farming, particularly in South America and how that was really sort of causing problems there. But nevertheless, they pursued that. And so the tilapia then globally became like a big replacement fish and shrimp always has been in demand. And there are two sort of really commonly farmed aquacultured fish. I keep stumbling over. I'm not quite sure how to call this. Like, we'll just go with the aquacultured. I just made up a new verb, aquacultured.

JORDEN

made up a new verb,

JORDEN

No, excuse me. This is the thing that we talked about in mangroves, right? Like the destruction of mangroves we're seeing around the globe for those temporary shrimp pens and then moving on to the next area and the associated damage from that. And this is. I think one of the hardest things for me in this episode was how it can be done really great. And there are already evidence of it and we've seen it and it can be done in a mass, basically industrial farming type style, which leads to the same kind of sustainability challenges we're seeing with those. One of the. One of the best systems I found was nearshore fish cage systems in bays. But the key there, and this will be no surprise to sustainability advocates, is companies that are designing them as a full system. So combination of fish cages with seaweed agriculture was the word I saw for that. And then the raising of the bivalve species such as oysters or mussels. produce overlapping benefits between the three. So you can actually get the benefits of aquaculture and raising the fish, but the seaweed and the bivalves reduce that nutrient loading in the water, reduce a lot of that runoff. And so it just was one of those like duh moments where you're like, oh, if you actually think about anything as an interrelated system, you can start to minimize some of these. And maybe we just need to mimic nature a little bit more and how we're setting up some of our systems.

KIMBERLY

But not only that, but then that also gives diversity of economy for whoever the producers are. So they're not just dependent on the fish per se. They also get the benefit of the bivalves. They also get the benefit of being able to harvest seaweed and those other nutrients too. So that is a much more complete picture. And it's like biodiversity and farming, the same sort of thing that goes on on land, except happening in... The water in water.

JORDEN

water. And it is definitely more complicated. But the great thing is going back to my cod example. One of the things I think I kind of almost it's hard not to laugh when saying it to people now is economic sustainability over the long run is synonymous with environmental sustainability. Like in 1958, those cod fishermen thought that they were economically at the powerhouse. Look how much we're making. And 10, 20 years later, their children can't do that job anymore. They like hollowed out those communities. And so really just pushing that the economic sustainability and environmental sustainability are synonymous over the long run, I think drives a lot of this. And like you said, that's that economic sustainability for a more comprehensive system allows you to weather some of those changes in the cultural trends too, right? Like I had seaweed salad, I think three times in the last week on a trip we were doing. And if that is rising at the same time, maybe tilapia or the fish you're growing is going down. that like can insulate you from the economic shock a little bit right oh for sure and that's the thing too with with the salmon farms and so forth people who have chile is a major producer of salmon that gives them nuns also some

KIMBERLY

for sure and that's the thing too with with the salmon farms and so forth people who have chile is a major producer of salmon that gives them nuns also some We've got some ways, different ways to diversify our economy when, for example, with Chile ends up in a dispute with Peru over fishing rights and borders. So, OK, well, now we can transition and we can shelter ourselves a bit from that hit that we're going to take and also better our relations with Peru, which means now we're going to have better trade and more trade across borders. That is a very different sort of. benefit that people don't tend to think of when they're just looking at the one like, OK, here's our problem and looking at a very sort of narrow way.

JORDEN

I mean, taking a holistic approach to problems, that should be a tagline somewhere in this. The one method I wanted to kind of touch on because it made me sad at the opposite end. You know, we start I started with my best practice. I found deep water fish cage systems are on the rise and being piloted. And this was driven by a lot of the attention to the kind of coastline and nearshore. water pens that were driving pollution, right? And the same thing that we see from agricultural runoff in massive, you know, dead zones. So in a very human response, some companies have said, well, what if we just move it out past where people can see it into deep water? The benefit being it disperses the harmful contaminants more efficiently into a wider area. But already pilots are showing it's lower fish production than near shore. It's also much higher production costs. So I think this is an interesting example where actually doing the more complicated method and building out a better system will probably be cheaper and more effective than just ignoring the problem and pushing it out. So that's given me some hope as we were looking at this, that the actual economic incentives on this one are a little bit more aligned than some of the other issues that we've looked at.

KIMBERLY

You asked me, did I have a favorite? I can tell you what my least favorite is without question. The ranching is like the worst in my opinion, because basically all they do is just what you just described, right? Is like have some sort of confined area, not too far off the coast. So it's polluting the waters. It's causing dead zones. It's also taking fish away from local fishers because they catch fish. The ranchers catch fish to fatten up the tuna. They use just as many, if not more, antibiotics because of the small confined areas as livestock farming. And so the ones that have actually been successful are tuna aquaculture. Now, this is something that was, Japan was very innovative in Japan through some university research. in the late 1970s. So that's how long ago. And that's an interesting story in itself that the Japanese apparently were never really terribly interested in tuna until the Americans were there because the big giant bluefin tuna were very similar to beef. And so there was that American demand for that. The Japanese got this acquired taste for this and hence the demand, increased demand for tuna. And so by already the 1970s, the Japanese are thinking, you know, we've got tuna concerns now. And so they start doing this R &D toward figuring out how to have closed farm breeding projects. And so they actually started with wild eggs, fish from wild eggs from wild fish and spawned them in captivity. And it took a few generations, but they were actually able to reproduce them in captivity, which for tuna is pretty miraculous because they are out of necessity, a migratory fish. But this has not been, I mean, there have just only been a few instances where there have been a huge investment in doing this and being able to make it successful. And in fact, actually, it was eventually sold off, the project was sold off to a subsidiary of Toyota. And so this is what we're talking about. And also Mitsubishi, in fact, is actually when it comes to tuna fishing in the international waters in the deep sea. Mitsubishi is a big stockholder and designs ships with super freezers, instant super freezing and stuff for tuna. Because of this huge demand in Japan and being able to zip it around the world really quickly and quick, most tuna has actually been frozen. It's just not in the frozen in the sense that we think because it was flash frozen and shipped and taken to market and immediately thawed to make it look like it was fresh. For this, this is the way to go about it, is to actually have this where you're spawning it in captivity, being able to have it go to maturity, being able to sell it that way, because that cuts down on all of the pollution factors and other things that go along with just trying to do it along a coastline.

JORDEN

So this is where I have to throw in a Canadian fun fact. Flash freezing fish was inspired by the American inventor. In a trip up to Canada. I didn't know that.

KIMBERLY

I didn't know that. Bird's eye.

JORDEN

eye. Bird's eye. Yeah. And notice in Labrador Territory of Canada that the fish that would freeze almost immediately be pulled from the water. So it was now mimicking a natural process. So a lot of times we do think of frozen food as being worse. Right. But again, for sushi grade fish, you actually need to freeze it to ensure that it has the right texture and has the kills off any of the harmful parasites. So that's another little Canadian slip in there.

KIMBERLY

Yeah. Buy an American. Well, an American who did it in Canada. I was going to say,

JORDEN

I was going to say, well, even most of Canada's great ideas somehow end up in America. But it's a really good point on the tuna that this doesn't work for every type of fish, right?

KIMBERLY

I think the point from this should be that American -Canadian cooperation is actually mutually beneficial.

JORDEN

Right? We have a long history of that. Right. But one of the concerns I have overall is whether it's done in the best way or in like the more harmful ways is this pushing towards monoculture in fishing. Right. And what that'll do to regional environments, because we've seen this. Everywhere else where we monoculture, whether it's in plants, whether it's in ground -based livestock, it always leads to A, disease problems, B, environmental destruction. You just shouldn't have that much of one type of any animal in an environment. So when I was going through what fish this really works for, I mean, most people could guess, I think, even if they're not interested in sustainability, you know, your mussels, your oysters, your shrimp. I didn't know about tuna. That's interesting. The tilapia, the salmon, those kinds of fish are the ones that we found it works for. And that is sadly losing a lot of the amazing diversity of fish we have in the world.

KIMBERLY

Well, not only that, one of the biggest complaints against farmed fish is that it just doesn't taste as good. And that totally makes sense because if you're out in the wild, you're getting a very diverse diet and exposure. Whereas if you're in a tank, you're going to get whatever they feed you, right? How boring would that be?

JORDEN

boring would that be? From a cooking and marketing perspective, I find it really interesting. Typically, if you're eating a redfish on a restaurant menu and it's described as smooth and buttery, it is going to be farmed fish. Now, if it's described as complex and rich, it's going to be a wild fish. That's getting at that distinction right there. You know, it's almost like a wildlife or something. A farmed life produces a complete like a fattened, you know, kind of lazy fish versus something that had to go out and actually forage and have a diverse diet. And I think that actually the diet into the fish drives a lot of that problem with the taste of it. Right. You're basically feeding, in some cases, straight grain products to these fish, which is baffling.

KIMBERLY

Or ground up fish also, which is then also feeding into the same problem of the supply.

JORDEN

Exactly. Yeah.

KIMBERLY

Yeah. And it's with with economic, another economic factor along with that is that not just the taste factor and then being able to sell this and having to put your spin on it, but that we have small scale operators who can't compete with the large scale operators. But we've got this whole system that benefits these large scale farms. And it's the same with every other agriculture thing that we talk about. So it's the little people who end up biting you like whether it's. along the coastlines then they they don't only lose access to being able to make money from fishing but they lose money to their nutrition that they were also getting they lose they lose they're they're being the disadvantage of also additional pollution and dead zones and all of those sorts of things and so so it's kind of like a lose -lose for them when it comes to this

JORDEN

That was actually going to be the production and consumption were going to be mismatched to a large degree. I was surprised to find that actual consumption aligns much more with where we're seeing production in East Asia in particular. Iceland has the highest per capita consumption, though. So not surprising where you're seeing that. The problem there again, though, is you're going from a more varied diet for those regions, right? And multiple types of fish to like, as you pointed out, now they can't access those fish or those fish stocks are dying from the pollution and they're being restricted down to a more costly for them and more limited diet, which is, I think, a loss at both an environmental and cultural level.

KIMBERLY

Right. And then also the environmental, right? So they've got the habitat destruction. So like what we talked about with the mangroves, with more fishing going in, that then also contributes to degradation of the mangroves and the wetlands and, you know, using this to build farming space and clearing land for fish, for feed for fish. So, okay, having more algae is great, but you don't want to grow more algae at the risk of getting rid of the mangroves. No, exactly. Because again, it goes back to monocropping.

JORDEN

exactly. Because again, it goes back to monocropping. Yeah, and not thinking about it as a connected system, right? Like, oh, we'll just fill this lake with algae. Well, that's going to do a lot of, you know, algae blooms everybody has heard of. And now we're trying to do it. It's always funny, I think, with humans how we're like, oh, here's a problem. We can monetize that, right? Well,

KIMBERLY

not only that, but also places that have ended up, oh my gosh, places that have ended up introducing invasive species either. as a because they want to grow it so they think that this is going to be moneymaker for them or inadvertently and then it ends up taking over their natural habitat because they don't have a natural predator or a natural any sort of anything to keep it in check

JORDEN

And, you know, I can hear some of my friends who I know listen to the show saying, well, what about the land based methods? What about the, you know, again, I give the example of that family friend who did a spawning barn down to two lakes. Why can't we do it on land like that? And it comes back to the two big problems that you've mentioned, the growing crops to then feed them. It's not just because you can put the fishing on a small piece of land and, you know, put it in a warehouse and it looks like it's not destroying the broader ecosystem. That just separates the fish from then what's happening outside that chain to bring the food in. And the second is the energy intensity of any land -based method of growing fish or growing them in closed systems. I think of it similarly to vertical farming. You know, it was supposed to save farming. It was supposed to be great. And the energy requirements and the economics of it have ensured that it will not ever really, I think, scale until we have energy that is far, far cheaper than it is now.

KIMBERLY

Yeah. And also, as we talked about pollution, the waste management, when it's more in that more concentrated area, as opposed to just fish swimming around in the wild, that makes, and it's not only the waste from the animals themselves, but also the extra nutrients and chemicals that go into the waters and surrounding waters. And then you have the runoff that causes, you know, you've got deforestation of mangroves, and then that ends up in this, they're doing this to build farms, you're going to end up with runoff then in other areas because of growing trying to set these up on land well and as you mentioned antibiotics i mean you know for listeners imagine somewhat giant pens packed to the gills for the no pun intended no pun intended with with fish that breeding diseases at unnatural rates and instead of again building a better system spreading it out less fish

JORDEN

and as you mentioned antibiotics i mean you know for listeners imagine somewhat giant pens packed to the gills for the no

KIMBERLY

no pun intended

JORDEN

No pun intended with fish that breeding diseases at unnatural rates and instead of again building a better system spreading it out less fish The solution that we've come to is, oh, we'll just dump antibiotics into the water around them. Water is not a closed system in any way. And so, again, the pollution, the antibiotics, it's not limited to the area where it's grown. And in the case of the destruction of the mangroves and the salmon, they get to pack up and leave at the end of the season to go cut down another mangrove and not think about the destruction that that is now causing for generations of fish in that area.

KIMBERLY

Yeah, it's actually worse in some ways than factory farming on land because that stays in the same place more or less. But factory farming or fishing in some of these instances is just going to the next area and just degrading one more area.

JORDEN

Well, that's just it. Just because they left the mangrove a mile down the beach and cut down this one doesn't mean that, again, that pollution, those antibiotics aren't migrating into that still remaining mangrove and destroying the fish stocks there, losing the biodiversity. This one really makes me sad in some ways because a lot of the methods we have now, we feel like they're isolated. It's a pen. It's right there. And it allows us to ignore the broader impacts.

KIMBERLY

Well, and I think the one thing that does also sets this apart from land factory farming is. depleting the blue carbon sinks, which is, as we talked about in previous episodes, those are like super mega important. So that's a takes it. That's a huge hit then that we in a sustainability sense take by having the basic factory fishing going on.

JORDEN

And then we haven't really kind of touched on the CO2 emissions, but at the end, like, as I said, wild fish. better on the emission standpoint and we haven't really come up with a method that gets those emissions for and i looked at this both ways i think one of the common pushbacks i hear is we always talk about protein well what about calories there's so much more calories in it and just to put that to bed no matter which way you look at it on a per calorie or per protein basis vegetables are better on for for co2 emissions There's a little vegan dance there. So we still haven't come up with a system that balances across these issues. So even going to my best practice method, you're still going to have higher CO2 emissions than if we were looking at a plant -based diet.

KIMBERLY

Yeah, I think what it comes down to is the issues with aquaculture are just fairly nearer those that we discussed with conventional versus organic farming. And because of this, it really depends on the farm's approach, the farmer's approach to whether or not aquaculture is more sustainable and a better way to conserve and consume life, sea life. But, you know, like, again, it's about, I mean, it's totally doable in the same way that we could have on the whole planet. We could have amazing organic farms and it could feed everybody. But because of the way the system is set up and how it's biased toward, that's not likely to be the outcome, unfortunately.

JORDEN

No, and I think stopping on that for a second is really important because it's not a crazy evil manipulation kind of like to set it up. It is simply an actual reduction of risk. It's that end business wanting to give you the consumer a product that you're going to buy. And for them, the easiest way to do that is to have one supplier who controls the source and you can go back to and push on them when it doesn't meet your standards versus having 100 suppliers that you're so it's. It's one of those hard, I think, things to pull out in some of these issues is that it's a very natural way that we get there, right? We want to reduce risk. We want a consistent product. And then what that actually plays out back up the supply chain and how that is driving a lot of these issues.

KIMBERLY

But I think this goes along with the basic problem we have in the global economic system and development. anything so it requires and this is what we'll cover in part two right who who are the different actors who are involved in trying to set this in in in a direction that's much more sustainable and giving people on the ground a sort of fighting chance to be able to be able to be competitive instead of just having to just like throw themselves into it and say okay we're going to do it and we're going to do it the cheapest way and the So we'll have to cut down some mangroves in the process. And OK, so we're going to need to buy some extra antibiotics. Oh, well, that's going to cause some extra pollution, whatever. But we'll deal with that later because we literally can't afford to deal with all of those problems right now because of the way the system is set up.

JORDEN

Yeah. And this plays out on the actual the local fishers. I think this is an ethical concern for me as I was looking into this. And so right now, despite the significantly higher amount of aquaculture fish, we've actually seen that aquaculture does not produce the same level of jobs for those regions. And so you can only find for 2018, but worldwide, 59 million people were employed in the fishing industry. 38 million of those were wild fishers versus 20 million in the aquaculture industry. But again, by. it peaked in 2013 and and surpassed it so you know you're looking five years ahead we're producing significantly more fish through aquaculture but it's not translating into that local economic benefit in the same way and then you know looking at it as a concentrated industry it allows for a lot more of those profits to be siphoned up to that company and out of the local area and i think that's While I'm overall supportive of aquaculture, because again, fish stocks, I think that's the real driver here at the end of the day is the collapse of fish stocks. I don't think we've really thought through how that plays out in the regional impacts of it.

KIMBERLY

And because so many people worldwide are dependent on fishing just and as a primary source of income and a primary source of nourishment, this is definitely a. low -level, sort of local -level issue that people, governments, institutions have to deal with or else this is going to cause food insecurity?

JORDEN

100%. And the hard part for governments is it's a lot easier to meet with the one big company and understand their concerns than to try to organize and understand the concerns of 100 fishers in 100 different fishing villages, right? At the end of the day, that the little guy gets left out because while it's the same on the sales side, it's the same for the government. It's just easier to deal with that one industry representative or a collection of two or three multinationals.

KIMBERLY

Yeah. And so we'll talk more about this in part two of our aquaculture episode that will drop next Thursday. Until then, if you enjoyed our episode of Sustainable Planet, or even if you didn't, let us know at splanetpod at gmail .com. We're on Facebook, Instagram. LinkedIn and YouTube. You'll find our show notes on our website as planet pod .com along with additional resources from today's episode. You can find more on my sub stack posts about what we talk about on the show. If you really liked our show, recommend us to one of your friends and be really grateful for that if you could do that for us. And also grade us and tell people what you think. So thank you for listening. Have a sustainable day.