John McQuaid

U.S. supermarkets are trying to do the right thing by imposing some standards on farmed fish:

Whole Foods plans to announce today the first comprehensive set of aquaculture guidelines by a major retailer. Wal-Mart has established standards for farmed shrimp and certified its factories with the Aquaculture Certification Council. And Wegmans worked with Environmental Defense Fund on its farmed-shrimp policy to ban antibiotics, avoid damaging sensitive habitats, treat waste water and reduce the use of wild fish to feed shrimp.

This is a good start. But it’s only a start. Aquaculture is one of those third- or fourth-tier environmental issues that are more revealing than giant problems such as climate change, because they show why various world systems – natural and manmade – are stressed to the point of breakdown right now. It’s a classic case of seemingly benign, yet perverse incentives backfiring. In this case, consumers have good motives for seeking out farmed fish. They want a better diet. They know there’s too much fishing going on. They know that some wild-caught fish contain unhealthy levels of mercury and other chemicals. In addition, the global supply of wild-caught fish leveled off some years back, driving demand for alternatives further upward. So, aquaculture production has doubled in the past 10 years.

But fish farming is itself an engine of radical environmental/ecological/social change. What happens when you quickly create an industry that has no pre-existing infrastructure, and do it mostly in remote coastal landscapes of the developing world? You get many, many problems. I’ll never forget a trip I took in the 1990s to a shrimp farming region in southern Thailand. A few years earlier, the area had been rice paddies. Then the seafood corporations and venture capitalists arrived, and boom – all the rice paddies were shrimp farms, and subsistence rice cultivators were Thailand’s newest entrepreneurs. But there was no environmental oversight. Landscape was ugly and degraded. Shrimp waste was in piles everywhere. Social problems were on the rise as the farmers spent previously-unimaginable sums of cash. Etc.

Scenes like this have been spreading to different areas of the world, as this Greenpeace report documents (warning: pdf file). There are pernicious innovations, too, including tuna ranching, in which bluefin tuna are captured, caged and fattened – something that is driving their low numbers down further. So as the consumers at Whole Foods and Wal-Mart chowed down on their tilapia and thought they were doing themselves and the world a favor, they were subsidizing the futher fraying of the coastal ecologies around the world.

Efforts like the WWF’s certification program attempt to use those same incentives in a positive manner, by upping demand for sustainable seafood and marginalizing the bad actors. But it’s not clear this type of program will ever do the trick – what’s needed, ultimately, is a combination of actual enforcement and responsible business practices in those remote spots. Until that happens, Western consumers will still be complicit in a lot of unneccessary ecological degradation.