Rather than aiming at consumers’ conscience about what they put on their dinner tables, finding alternative feed sources for chickens, pigs and cows may be a more fruitful path to choose when it comes to saving dwindling fish stocks, researchers behind a new global study say.
Some facts, according to the researchers behind the University of British Columbia study:
- 36 per cent of the world’s total fisheries catch each year is currently ground up into fishmeal and oil to feed farmed fish, chickens and pigs.
- Peru produces half of the world’s fishmeal using anchovies – meanwhile, 25 per cent of its infants are malnourished.
- Globally, pigs and chickens alone consume six times the amount of seafood as US consumers use, and twice that of Japan.
“Ultimately these farm animals have a greater impact on our seafood supplies than the most successful seafood certification program”, says Jennifer Jacquet, the lead author of the study.
The noted professor Daniel Pauly, a co-author, adds that “we should work to eliminate the use of tasty fish for livestock production. It’s a waste”.
“Plus, it is not what pigs or chickens naturally eat. When is the last time you saw a chicken fishing?”
The study reviews the effectiveness of past conservation campaigns, as well as discusses future strategies to accomplish more large-scale change, including re-directing more of the effort into reducing the farm industry’s demand for fishmeal/fishoil, and influencing giant supermarket chains rather than focusing on individual consumers.
The study also suggests that people’s concerns for global climate change should be brought in more often as an argument in the overfishing debate.
“Global fisheries consume 50 billion litres of fuel each year just to catch and land fish,” says Dr. Jacquet. “That’s more gas than 22 million cars would use. Energy use would even be much higher if we include the fuel used to ship fish further for processing and to market. No discussion of the overall impact of fisheries would be complete without clarifying its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.”