Fisheries and Aquaculture Fact Sheet

The world fish catch is a measure of the productivity and health of the oceanic ecosystem that covers 70 percent of the earth's surface. The extent to which world demand for seafood is outrunning the sustainable yield of fisheries can be seen in shrinking fish stocks, declining catches, and collapsing fisheries.

Seafood plays a vital role in world food security. Roughly 3 billion people get about 20 percent of their animal protein from fishery products.

The world fish catch has hovered around 90 million tons over the last 20 years.

The wild fish catch per person has dropped dramatically, from 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds) per person at its height in 1988 to 13 kilograms in 2012—a 37-year low.

Over four fifths of the world’s fisheries are either considered fully exploited, with no room for safely increasing the catch, or they are already overfished and in need of rebuilding.

Small forage fish account for over half the supply of food fish in 36 countries, including the Maldives, the Philippines, and Ghana.

In 2012, world farmed fish production topped beef production for the first time in modern history.

China accounts for 60 percent of world farmed fish production.

Wild fish play a large role in the production of meat, milk, eggs, and farmed fish. Some 6 million tons of fishmeal and 1 million tons of fish oil are produced each year. Nearly all of the fishmeal is fed to farmed fish, pigs, and poultry; 74 percent of fish oil goes to fish farms.

Some aquacultural producers are scaling back. Between 1995 and 2007, the fishmeal content in shrimp feed dropped from 28 percent to 18 percent. The drop was even more dramatic for salmon, from 45 percent to 24 percent.

People will likely eat more fish from farms than from the wild in 2014, a historical milestone. As the world’s oceans are fished to their limits, any increase in world fish consumption will come from farms. Fish farming output is expected to increase 33 percent by 2021.

Well-managed marine reserves, where fishing is off-limits, help protect biodiversity and rebuild fish stocks. Fish catch and tourism revenue outside reserve boundaries often increase. More

 

© 2014

Food, Energy, Water and the Climate: AbPerfect Storm of Global Events?

Food, Energy, Water and the Climate: A Perfect Storm of Global Events?

Summary

John Beddington

There is an intrinsic link between the challenge we face to ensure food security through the 21st century and other global issues, most notably climate change, population growth and the need to sustainably manage the world’s rapidly growing demand for energy and water. It is predicted that by 2030 the world will need to produce 50 per cent more food and energy, together with 30 per cent more available fresh water, whilst mitigating and adapting to climate change. This threatens to create a ‘perfect storm’ of global events. Science and technology can make a major contribution, by providing practical solutions. Securing this contribution requires that high priority be attached both to research and to facilitating the real world deployment of existing and emergent technologies. On food, we need a new, “greener revolution”. Techniques and technologies from many disciplines, ranging from biotechnology and engineering to newer fields such as nanotechnology, will be needed. On water, managing and balancing supply and demand for water across sectors requires a range of policy and technological solutions. Meeting the demand for energy, while mitigating and adapting to climate change, will require a mix of behavioural change and technological solutions. More (PDF)

By John Beddington CMG FRS Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government, Government Office for Science, Kingsgate House, 66-74 Victoria Street London SW1E 6SW, mpst.beddington@bis.gsi.gov.uk

 

© 2014

Threat to food security

Warming sea temperatures and ocean acidification put the millions around the world who rely on the sea, at risk.

He sat shirtless on his thin bamboo floor in a home built on posts rising out of the Banda Sea. Tadi had just returned in his dugout canoe from scanning crevices in a nearby reef for octopus. He and his neighbours spend every day this way – scouring the ocean for something to eat or sell. Fishing, here, is about survival.

Their stilt village on Hoga Island, Indonesia, has no industry, no land, no running water. They dive without oxygen, wearing hand-carved wooden goggles, and carry spearguns hacked from logs with their machetes. They eat what they catch and sell the rest, using the money to buy everything else they need: boat fuel, root vegetables, rice and wood.

Without fishing, “how would I feed my family?” asked Tadi, who like many Indonesians has only one name.

Now Tadi’s community, like countless others across the globe, is on a collision course with the industrialised world’s fossil fuel emissions. Hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on marine life susceptible to warming temperatures and ocean acidification, the souring of seas from carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal, oil and natural gas. That includes US Pacific Northwest oyster growers and crabbers in the frigid Bering Sea, who now face great uncertainty from shifts in marine chemistry.

But from Africa to Alaska, many coastal communities face a substantially greater risk. These cultures are so thoroughly dependent on marine life threatened by carbon dioxide that a growing body of research suggests their children or grandchildren could struggle to find enough food. The science of deciphering precisely who might see seafood shortages remains embryonic, but with many of the most at-risk coastal communities already facing poverty, marine pollution, over-fishing and rising seas, the potential for calamity is high.

“I can’t tell you how many people will be affected,” said Sarah Cooley, at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who studies links between acidification and food security. “But it’s going to be a very big number.”

Said Andreas Andersson, an acidification and coral reef expert with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego: “These people are literally going to be fighting for their lives.” More

 

Less Than 3 Percent of Oceans in Marine Parks Despite Recent Growth

In May 1975, rising concerns about overfishing and deteriorating ocean health prompted scientists and officials from 33 countries to meet in Tokyo for the first global conference on marine parks and reserves.

Noting the need for swift action to safeguard more of the sea, the delegates were unanimous in calling for the creation of a global system of marine protected areas (MPAs)—zones explicitly managed for the conservation of aquatic ecosystems.

Today, with oceanic resources more threatened than ever, the world is far from that envisioned MPA network. Although coverage has doubled since 2010, just 2.8 percent of the ocean surface—some 10 million square kilometers (4 million square miles), roughly the size of the United States—is now in designated MPAs. And the level of protection varies. Some MPAs allow seabed mining, for instance, and most MPAs allow at least some fishing. In others, fishing and other destructive activities are off-limits entirely. These “no-take” MPAs, also called marine reserves, are thought to provide the greatest conservation value, yet they account for less than half of the world’s marine protected area.

A wealth of experience and scientific research shows that by protecting all habitats and marine life within their borders, well-managed no-take zones effectively preserve biodiversity and can restore adjacent fisheries, greatly benefiting both ecosystems and the people dependent on them. In general, fish populations increase after a reserve is established, and individual fish grow larger. Heavily overfished species usually show the greatest gains, and the positive results can come quickly.

While there are often concerns that closing fishing grounds will negatively impact access to food and livelihoods, evidence suggests that reserves often have the opposite effect. Because there is no physical boundary, fish may venture out of the MPA to areas where anglers can catch them. Older, larger fish have more offspring, which also can leave the reserve as eggs or larvae, eventually replenishing depleted stocks. The potential to support fisheries has great implications for food security: worldwide some 3 billion people get at least 20 percent of their animal protein from fish, but close to 90 percent of fish stocks are being fished at or beyond sustainable levels. There are also non-fishery benefits. Protected areas can attract more tourist dollars, helping offset MPA management costs. (See Table.)

Surveys of people living near reserves in Fiji, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Solomon Islands, support this point. Summarized in a report by The Nature Conservancy called Nature’s Investment Bank, the surveys pointed to improved fish catches outside MPA boundaries, increased protein intake, and even poverty alleviation—especially from new jobs in tourism.

Thus marine reserves are widely seen as a crucial tool in the conservation toolkit—one that is sorely needed as pressures on the world’s oceans continue to mount. Take the highly productive coral reefs that provide nurseries for fish, protect shorelines, and support the livelihoods of millions of people. Some 75 percent of the world’s coral reefs are threatened by overfishing, pollution, warming waters, and a host of other hazards. A 2013 study in Belize showed that protection from fishing and industrial activity bolsters reef resilience: coral reefs in marine reserves there may be six times more likely than unprotected ones to regrow after major disturbances such as hurricanes.

The world’s largest coral reef system, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, is home to probably the best known MPA, which opened in 1979. Spanning some 340,000 square kilometers, this park boasts incredible biodiversity, including more than 1,600 fish species, and brings in some $4 billion a year from tourism. Zoning plans developed in the 1980s made a scant 4.5 percent of the MPA off-limits to fishing and provided very uneven habitat protection. But in 2004, it was rezoned to better protect all 70 of its distinct habitat types—30 of them reef habitats, and the rest non-reef types such as mangroves. Now at least 20 percent of each of these “bioregions” is no-take and, all told, fishing is banned in one third of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

Nearly all no-take MPAs to date have been small and near to shore, but calls are growing for more set-asides of hundreds of thousands or even millions of square kilometers to create vast buffers around islands and to protect open ocean wilderness areas—and with them, conceivably, the entire life cycles of far-ranging marine species like sea turtles, sharks, and tunas. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Global Ocean Legacy project has been a prominent champion of the idea, working with scientists and both national and local governments to establish “the first generation of great marine parks around the globe by 2022.” It was integral, for example, in the U.S. designation of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in 2006, which protects 362,000 square kilometers around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. At the time this was by far the largest no-take marine reserve in the world.

Then in 2010 it was surpassed by another Pew-backed park when the United Kingdom declared a 640,000-square-kilometer reserve—larger than the United Kingdom itself—in the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. In 2012, after an aggressive public outreach campaign led by Pew, Australia declared a 1-million-square-kilometer MPA adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef in the Coral Sea, half of it no-take. And Pew is also proposing a park around the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific, another U.K. territory, that would add 830,000 square kilometers to the global no-take area.

Not all recent attempts to create large reserves have succeeded. In early November 2013, Russia, Ukraine, and China—worried about possible harm to their fishing interests—scuttled international talks on two massive proposed reserves in the Southern Ocean. This was the third time in a year that countries reached an impasse on the proposals, which would have banned fishing in 2.8 million square kilometers in Antarctic waters. Although proponents will resubmit the reserves for consideration in 2014, prospects look grim after this latest setback.

In addition to expanding the number and area of MPAs worldwide, another marine conservation priority is improving the effectiveness of existing parks. Most MPAs to date lack the trained staff and funding needed to properly manage them, making monitoring and enforcement of restrictions difficult and leading many to be dubbed “paper parks” (that is, protected on paper only). One encouraging attempt to address this problem is the Caribbean Challenge Initiative. With the backing of a $42-million endowment—funded by The Nature Conservancy, the Global Environment Fund, and the German Development Bank—10 Caribbean nations are developing national trust funds to be used solely to improve management of existing parks (land and marine) and to establish new ones that are effective from the start. Funds are set to be disbursed beginning in early 2014, as the countries move ahead on their overall goal of having at least 20 percent of their near-shore marine and coastal area in well-managed MPAs by 2020.

What would it take to run a global network of MPAs? In 2004, a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined the potential costs of administering a worldwide network that would conserve 20 percent or more of the world’s oceans. Based on data for over 80 existing MPAs, the authors conservatively estimated that such a network might cost $12.5 billion annually. What they concluded nearly a decade ago is still true today: we could protect a large chunk of our marine ecosystems for much less than the estimated $20 billion that governments spend to subsidize overfishing each year.

Well-designed and managed MPAs are only part of the puzzle in restoring fisheries and ocean ecosystems. Other important steps include putting stricter catch limits on fisheries, removing harmful fishing subsidies, and dramatically reducing the pollution entering the sea from farms, cities, and industry. Cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming, will also be essential to minimize the rise in temperatures and changing chemistry already undermining ocean ecosystems. Only by tackling all of these problems simultaneously will we have a decent chance at reversing marine decline. More

 

Life in Antarctica Relies on Shrinking Supply of Krill

On the Antarctic island of South Georgia, in February, toward the middle of what passes for summer at the bottom of the world, I hurried through the ruined whaling station of Grytviken.

I had an appointment at the British Antarctic Survey station on the opposite side of King Edward Cove. I was to interview a marine ecologist working on krill. I did not want to be late.

The keystone of the South Georgia ecosystem, the secret to the miraculous abundance of wildlife on this stark, cold, windswept island—the foundation, indeed, for almost all vertebrate life in the Antarctic—is krill.

South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands are administered from the Falkland Islands as a British Overseas Territory, in which the little outpost of Grytviken is the only inhabited spot. The inhabitation is very marginal. In southern winter there are just eight staff members of the British Antarctic Survey, including a doctor, a government officer, and a postal clerk. A handful of visiting scientists augment this skeleton crew in southern summer.

Grytviken is gritty and grim. The name means "Pot Bay," a reference to the cauldrons in which the Norwegian whalers here rendered oil from blubber. It is apt. The rusting vats, boilers, ramps, chimneys, and ramshackle buildings of the long-abandoned whaling station; the wrecks of the catcher boats stranded on the waterfront; and the rows of giant whale-oil tanks upslope are all the apparatus of a genocide, in the literal, Latin sense of the word. The genus was Balaenoptera, the baleen whale.

From the whale's upper jaw, in place of teeth, hang long, fringed curtains of keratin—baleen—used to seine krill. The largest member of the genus and the biggest creature ever to live, the blue whale gets that way from its ability to process eight tons of krill a day.

The Antarctic, in its remoteness, girded by pack ice, abloom in summer with phytoplankton and coursing with torrents of krill, was the stronghold of the blue whale. The invention of the steam-powered catcher boat and the explosive harpoon ended all that. Today in the Southern Ocean, where a century ago 200,000 blue whales fed on the krill swarms of austral summer, only a few hundred are left. (Related: "Catching Copepods: Charasmatic Microfauna of the Arctic")

A Game of Chinese Boxes

If William Blake thought he had seen "dark satanic mills" in England, then he should have taken a stroll through Grytviken. After the darkness of the whaling station, and the black, snow-seamed rock of the encircling mountains, and the somber sky, the white interior of the British Antarctic Survey laboratory was dazzling.

For a moment I lost my bearings. Bright fluorescent light glinted from microscopes. Martin Collins turned away on a swivel stool from his laboratory workbench and stood to greet me. In his immaculate white lab coat he was incandescent, an angelic figure of medium height, pale-skinned, with semi-curly hair of indeterminate color. This might have been the start of the Rapture, with Collins as my heavenly guide—until I chanced to glance down. Beneath his white lab coat the ecologist was wearing muddy trousers and gumboots streaked with penguin guano.

He mimed an apology for not shaking hands, holding up both of his own to show blue rubber gloves. Just now he had been rooting around in fish stomachs. Pulling over a bucket of offal, he groped about inside and extracted a half-digested mackerel icefish. "That's come out of a skate's stomach," he said.

"A little worse for wear," I suggested.

Collins agreed and he dug again in the offal, searching for a more intact specimen. His bucket of guts was bloody, but not in the normal, crimson sense, for icefish have no hemoglobin. Their plasma is full of antifreeze but no red cells, so their blood runs clear.

"This one's probably slightly better," he said, holding up a less eroded fish. "There's a fishery for these mackerel icefish. We've done a trawl survey for icefish all around South Georgia to estimate the stocks. Icefish are krill feeders—80 percent of their diet is normally krill—so their stomachs can tell us what's happening with krill. I've done something like 650 icefish in the last couple of weeks. It's been a slightly strange year for the krill around South Georgia."

"Strange," I said. "In what way?"

"You get odd years, and 2004 was one of those, when there's a little bit less krill. This year seems to be fairly extreme. There's very little krill and scarcely any icefish at all. We're seeing the gentoo penguins struggling a little bit this season, as well. Not enough krill. The gentoos don't seem to be giving the food to their chicks that they normally do."

From his workbench Collins retrieved a glass dish of krill. He had extracted this handful—eight or nine little shrimplike crustaceans—from the stomach of an icefish, which he had previously extracted from the stomach of a skate, and had counted, weighed, and measured each one.

In death the krill were bright red. They were big Euphausia superba, the king of krill, probably the most successful species on Earth by measure of sheer biomass: roughly twice the weight of humanity, thronging in "swarms" as dense as 10,000 individuals per cubic meter.

In Norwegian, kril means "small fry." The noun is almost always a collective plural in that language, as it is in English. And as it is in the grammar of Nature herself, where krill are collective like no other organism. The name has an onomatopoeic rightness; "krill" seems to boil, seethe, swarm.

Collins's game of Chinese boxes—his opening of stomachs to investigate the stomachs within—had ended with this dish of krill. No further dissection was necessary, for krill are translucent, and the green contents of the gastric mill and the hepatopancreas were visible through the exoskeleton. In the middle of krill mating season, the last meal—interrupted by a hungry icefish—for these krill had been phytoplankton. More

 

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity By Lester R Brown

Chapter 1. Food: The Weak Link

Over the next several weeks, the Earth Policy Institute will be releasing Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity by Lester R. Brown in installments. Look for a new chapter about every other week. Supporting data, videos, and slideshows are available for free download at www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep.

The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of food. Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold. 1

 

The abrupt rise in world grain prices between 2007 and 2008 left more people hungry than at any time in history. It also spawned numerous food protests and riots. In Thailand, rice was so valuable that farmers took to guarding their ripened fields at night. In Egypt, fights in the long lines for state-subsidized bread led to six deaths. In poverty-stricken Haiti, days of rioting left five people dead and forced the Prime Minister to resign. In Mexico, the government was alarmed when huge crowds of tortilla protestors took to the streets. 2

After the doubling of world grain prices between 2007 and mid-2008, prices dropped somewhat during the recession, but this was short-lived. Three years later, high food prices helped fuel the Arab Spring. 3

We are entering a new era of rising food prices and spreading hunger. On the demand side of the food equation, population growth, rising affluence, and the conversion of food into fuel for cars are combining to raise consumption by record amounts. On the supply side, extreme soil erosion, growing water shortages, and the earth’s rising temperature are making it more difficult to expand production. Unless we can reverse such trends, food prices will continue to rise and hunger will continue to spread, eventually bringing down our social system. Can we reverse these trends in time? Or is food the weak link in our early twenty-first-century civilization, much as it was in so many of the earlier civilizations whose archeological sites we now study?

This tightening of world food supplies contrasts sharply with the last half of the twentieth century, when the dominant issues in agriculture were overproduction, huge grain surpluses, and access to markets by grain exporters. During that time, the world in effect had two reserves: large carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) and a large area of cropland idled under U.S. farm programs to avoid overproduction. When the world harvest was good, the United States would idle more land. When the harvest was subpar, it would return land to production. The excess production capacity was used to maintain stability in world grain markets. The large stocks of grain cushioned world crop shortfalls. When India’s monsoon failed in 1965, for example, the United States shipped a fifth of its wheat harvest to India to avert a potentially massive famine. And because of abundant stocks, this had little effect on the world grain price. 4

When this period of food abundance began, the world had 2.5 billion people. Today it has 7 billion. From 1950 to 2000 there were occasional grain price spikes as a result of weather-induced events, such as a severe drought in Russia or an intense heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. But their effects on price were short-lived. Within a year or so things were back to normal. The combination of abundant stocks and idled cropland made this period one of the most food-secure in world history. But it was not to last. By 1986, steadily rising world demand for grain and unacceptably high budgetary costs led to a phasing out of the U.S. cropland set-aside program. 5

Today the United States has some land idled in its Conservation Reserve Program, but it targets land that is highly susceptible to erosion. The days of productive land ready to be quickly brought into production when needed are over. 6

Ever since agriculture began, carryover stocks of grain have been the most basic indicator of food security. The goal of farmers everywhere is to produce enough grain not just to make it to the next harvest but to do so with a comfortable margin. From 1986, when we lost the idled cropland buffer, through 2001, the annual world carryover stocks of grain averaged a comfortable 107 days of consumption. 7

This safety cushion was not to last either. After 2001, the carryover stocks of grain dropped sharply as world consumption exceeded production. From 2002 through 2011, they averaged only 74 days of consumption, a drop of one third. An unprecedented period of world food security has come to an end. 8

When world grain supplies tightened in 2007, there was no idled U.S. cropland to quickly return to production and there were no excess grain stocks to draw upon. Within two decades, the world had lost both of its safety cushions.

The world is now living from one year to the next, hoping always to produce enough to cover the growth in demand. Farmers everywhere are making an all-out effort to keep pace with the accelerated growth in demand, but they are having difficulty doing so.

Today the temptation for exporting countries to restrict exports in order to dampen domestic food price rises is greater than ever. With another big jump in grain prices, we could see a breakdown in the world food supply system. If countries give in to the temptation to restrict exports, some lower-income importing countries might not be able to import any grain at all. When could this happen? We are not talking about the distant future. It could be anytime.

Food shortages undermined earlier civilizations. The Sumerians and Mayans are just two of the many early civilizations that declined apparently because they moved onto an agricultural path that was environmentally unsustainable. For the Sumerians, rising salt levels in the soil as a result of a defect in their otherwise well-engineered irrigation system eventually brought down their food system and thus their civilization. For the Mayans, soil erosion was one of the keys to their downfall, as it was for so many other early civilizations. We, too, are on such a path. While the Sumerians suffered from rising salt levels in the soil, our modern-day agriculture is suffering from rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. And like the Mayans, we too are mismanaging our land and generating record losses of soil from erosion. 9

While the decline of early civilizations can be traced to one or possibly two environmental trends such as deforestation and soil erosion that undermined their food supply, we are now dealing with several. In addition to some of the most severe soil erosion in human history, we are also facing newer trends such as the depletion of aquifers, the plateauing of grain yields in the more agriculturally advanced countries, and rising temperature.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the U.N. Food Price Index was at 201 in June 2012, twice the base level of 100 in 2002–04. (See Figure 1–1.) For most Americans, who spend on average 9 percent of their income on food, this is not a big deal. But for consumers who spend 50–70 percent of their income on food, a doubling of food prices is a serious matter. There is little latitude for them to offset the price rise simply by spending more. 10

Closely associated with the decline in stocks of grain and the rise in food prices is the spread of hunger. During the closing decades of the last century, the number of hungry people in the world was falling, dropping to a low of 792 million in 1997. After that it began to rise, climbing toward 1 billion. Unfortunately, if we continue with business as usual, the ranks of the hungry will continue to expand. 11

Those trapped between low incomes and the doubling of world food prices are forced to eat less. Most of the nearly 1 billion people who are chronically hungry and malnourished live in the Indian subcontinent or sub-Saharan Africa. There are pockets of hunger elsewhere, but these are the two remaining regions where hunger is pervasive. India, which now has a thriving economy, should be experiencing a steady decline in the number who are hungry and malnourished. But it is not, presumably because rising incomes among the poor cannot keep up with rising food prices. 12

In a hungry world, it is children who suffer the most. Rising world food prices are leaving millions of children dangerously hungry. Some are too weak to walk to school. Many are so nutritionally deprived that they are physically and mentally stunted. Neither we nor they will ever know what their full human potential could be. The costs of this will be visible for decades to come. 13

As a result of chronic hunger, 48 percent of all children in India are stunted physically and mentally. They are undersized, underweight, and likely to have IQs that are on average 10–15 points lower than those of well-nourished children. 1

In early 2012, Adam Nossiter wrote in the New York Times about the effect of high food prices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country where hunger is common. Interviewing individual families in Kinshasa, he noted that three years ago everyone ate at least one meal a day. But today even families with both parents working often cannot afford to eat every day. It is now a given in many households that some days will be foodless, days when they will not eat at all. Selecting the days when they will not eat is a weekly routine. 15

The international charity Save the Children commissioned detailed surveys in five countries—India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Peru, and Bangladesh—to see how people were dealing with rising food prices. Among other things, they learned that 24 percent of families in India now have foodless days. For Nigeria, the comparable figure is 27 percent. For Peru it is 14 percent. Family size plays an important role in hunger. Almost one third of large families in all countries surveyed have foodless days. 16

Historically there have been two sources of grain demand growth. The oldest of these is population growth. Each year the world adds nearly 80 million people. Tonight there will be 219,000 people at the dinner table who were not there last night, many of them with empty plates. Tomorrow night there will be another 219,000 people. Relentless population growth is putting excessive pressure on local land and water resources in many countries, making it difficult if not impossible for farmers to keep pace. 17

The second source of growing demand for grain is consumers moving up the food chain. As incomes rose in industrial countries after World War II, people began to consume more grain-intensive livestock and poultry products: meat, milk, and eggs. Today, with incomes rising fast in emerging economies, there are at least 3 billion people moving up the food chain in the same way. The largest single concentration of these new meat eaters is in China, which now consumes twice as much meat as the United States does. 18

Now there is a third source of demand for grain: the automobile. Distillers use grain to produce fuel ethanol for cars, an activity that is concentrated in the United States and that has developed largely since 2005. In 2011, the United States harvested nearly 400 million tons of grain. Of this, 127 million tons (32 percent) went to ethanol distilleries. 19

With this massive industrial capacity to convert grain into automotive fuel, the price of grain is now more closely linked to the price of oil than ever before. As the price of oil rises, it becomes more profitable to convert grain into ethanol. This sets the stage for competition for the grain harvest between the affluent owners of the world’s 1 billion automobiles and the world’s poorest people. 20

Population growth, the rising consumption of livestock and poultry products, and the use of grain to fuel cars together raised the world growth in grain consumption from an average of 21 million tons per year from 1990 to 2005 to 45 million tons per year from 2005 to 2011. Almost overnight, the annual growth in grain consumption doubled. 21

At a time when the world’s farmers are facing this record growth in food demand, they continue to wrestle with the traditional threats to production such as soil erosion. But now they are also looking at three new challenges on the production front. One, aquifers are being depleted and irrigation wells are starting to go dry in 18 countries that together contain half the world’s people. Two, in some of the more agriculturally advanced countries, rice and wheat yield per acre, which have been rising steadily for several decades, are beginning to plateau. And three, the earth’s temperature is rising, threatening to disrupt world agriculture in scary ways. 22

The countries where water tables are falling and aquifers are being depleted include the big three grain producers—China, India, and the United States. World Bank data for India indicate that 175 million people are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. My own estimate for China is that 130 million people are being fed by overpumping. In the United States, the irrigated area is shrinking in leading agricultural states such as California and Texas as aquifers are depleted and irrigation water is diverted to cities. 23

Second, after several decades of rising grain yields, some of the more agriculturally advanced countries are hitting a glass ceiling, a limit that was not widely anticipated. Rice yields in Japan, which over a century ago became the first country to launch a sustained rise in land productivity, have not increased for 17 years. In both Japan and South Korea, yields have plateaued at just under 5 tons per hectare. (One hectare = 2.47 acres.) China’s rice yields, rising rapidly in recent decades, are now closely approaching those of Japan. If China cannot raise its rice yields above those in Japan, and it does not seem likely that it can, then a plateauing there too is imminent. 24

A similar situation exists with wheat yields. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—the three leading wheat producers in Europe—there has been no rise for more than a decade. Other advanced countries will soon be hitting their glass ceiling for grain yields. 25

The third new challenge confronting farmers is global warming. The massive burning of fossil fuels is increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, raising the earth’s temperature and disrupting climate. It is now in a state of flux. Historically when there was an extreme weather event—an intense heat wave or a drought—we knew it was temporary and that things would likely be back to normal by the next harvest. Now there is no “norm” to return to, leaving farmers facing a future fraught with risk. 26

High temperatures can lower crop yields. The widely used rule of thumb is that for each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season farmers can expect a 10-percent decline in grain yields. A historical study of the effect of temperature on corn and soybean yields in the United States found that a 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature reduced grain yields 17 percent. Yet if the world continues with business as usual, failing to address the climate issue, the earth’s temperature during this century could easily rise by 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit). 27

In recent years, world carryover stocks of grain have been, only slightly above the 70 days that was considered a desirable minimum during the late twentieth century. Now stock levels must take into account the effect on harvests of higher temperatures, more extensive drought, and more intense heat waves. Although there is no easy way to precisely quantify the harvest effects of any of these climate-related threats, it is clear that any of them can shrink harvests, potentially creating chaos in the world grain market. To mitigate this risk, a stock reserve equal to 110 days of consumption would produce a much safer level of food security. 28

Although we talk about food price spikes, what we are more likely starting to see is a ratcheting upward of food prices. This process is likely to continue until we succeed in reversing some of the trends that are driving it. All of the threatening trends are of human origin, but whether we can reverse them remains to be seen.

As food supplies tighten, the geopolitics of food is fast overshadowing the geopolitics of oil. The first signs of trouble came in 2007, when world grain production fell behind demand. Grain and soybean prices started to climb, doubling by mid-2008. In response, many exporting countries tried to curb rising domestic food prices by restricting exports. Among them were Russia and Argentina, two leading wheat exporters. Viet Nam, the world’s number two rice exporter, banned exports entirely in the early months of 2008. Several other smaller grain suppliers also restricted exports. 29

With key suppliers restricting or banning exports, importing countries panicked. No longer able to rely on the market for grain, several countries tried to negotiate long-term grain supply agreements with exporting countries. The Philippines, a chronically rice-deficit country, attempted to negotiate a three-year agreement with Viet Nam for 1.5 million tons of rice per year. A delegation of Yemenis traveled to Australia with a similar goal in mind for wheat, but they had no luck. In a seller’s market, exporters were reluctant to make long-term commitments. 30

Fearing they might not be able to buy needed grain from the market, some of the more affluent countries, led by Saudi Arabia, China, and South Korea, then took the unusual step of buying or leasing land long term in other countries on which to grow food for themselves. These land acquisitions have since grown rapidly in number. Most of them are in Africa. Among the principal destinations for land hunters are Ethiopia, Sudan, and South Sudan, each of them countries where millions of people are being sustained with food donations from the U.N. World Food Programme. 31

As of mid-2012, hundreds of land acquisition deals had been negotiated or were under negotiation, some of them exceeding a million acres. A 2011 World Bank analysis of these “land grabs” reported that at least 140 million acres were involved—an area that exceeds the cropland devoted to corn and wheat combined in the United States. This onslaught of land acquisitions has become a land rush as governments, agribusiness firms, and private investors seek control of land wherever they can find it. Such acquisitions also typically involve water rights, meaning that land grabs potentially affect downstream countries as well. Any water extracted from the upper Nile River basin to irrigate newly planted crops in Ethiopia, Sudan, or South Sudan, for instance, will now not reach Egypt, upending the delicate water politics of the Nile by adding new countries that Egypt must compete with for water. 32

The potential for conflict is high. Many of the land deals have been made in secret, and much of the time the land involved was already being farmed by villagers when it was sold or leased. Often those already farming the land were neither consulted nor even informed of the new arrangements. And because there typically are no formal land titles in many developing-country villages, the farmers who lost their land have had little support for bringing their cases to court. 33

The bottom line is that it is becoming much more difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up with the world’s rapidly growing demand for grain. World grain stocks were drawn down a decade ago and we have not been able to rebuild them. If we cannot do so, we can expect that with the next poor harvest, food prices will soar, hunger will intensify, and food unrest will spread. We are entering a time of chronic food scarcity, one that is leading to intense competition for control of land and water resources—in short, a new geopolitics of food.

ENDNOTES:

1. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Production, Supply and Distribution, electronic database, at www.fas.usda.gov/psdonline, updated 12 June 2012; U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “FAO Food Price Index,” at www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en, updated 5 July 2012.

2. Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) futures data from TradingCharts.com, Inc., “Oilseed & Grain Futures/Commodities Charts/Quotes,” at futures.tradingcharts.com/grains_oilseeds.html, viewed 5 June 2012; International Monetary Fund (IMF), “IMF Primary Commodity Prices,” at www.imf.org/external/np/res/commod/index.aspx, updated 6 July 2012; FAO, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011: How Does International Price Volatility Affect Domestic Economies and Food Security? (Rome: 2011), pp. 44–47; Ian MacKinnon, “Farmers Fall Prey to Rice Rustlers as Price of Staple Crop Rockets,” (London) Guardian, 31 March 2008; Ellen Knickermeyer, “In Egypt, Upper Crust Gets the Bread,” Washington Post, 5 April 2008; James Bone, “UN Peacekeeper Killed in Haiti Riots Over Food Prices,” (London) The Times, 14 April 2008; Ronald Buchanan, “Mexico Protest Prompts Food Price Assurance,” Financial Times, 1 February 2007.

3. CBOT futures data from TradingCharts.com, Inc., op. cit. note 2; IMF, op. cit. note 2; Christian Parenti, “The Price of Bread: A Measure of Political Stability,” Mother Jones, 19 July 2011.

4. Douglas E. Bowers, Wayne D. Rasmussen, and Gladys L. Baker, History of Agricultural Price-Support and Adjustment Program, 1933–1985 (Washington, DC: USDA, 1984); Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), pp. 145–46; historical grain prices from IMF, International Financial Statistics, electronic database, at www.imfstatistics.org/imf, various years.

5. U.N. Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision, electronic database, at esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm, updated 3 May 2011; historical grain prices from IMF, op. cit. note 4; USDA, op. cit. note 1; Bowers, Rasmussen, and Baker, op. cit. note 4.

6. Tadlock Cowan, Conservation Reserve Program: Status and Current Issues (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 22 January 2010), p. 1.

7. USDA, op. cit. note 1.

8. Ibid.

9. Sandra Postel, Pillar of Sand (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), pp. 13–21; Michon Scott, “Mayan Mysteries,” in National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Earth Science Data and Information Systems Project, Supporting Earth Observing Science 2004 (Washington, DC: 2004), pp. 37–43; Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin Group, 2005).

10. Figure 1–1 from FAO, op. cit. note 1; food expenditures from USDA, “Table 7: Food Expenditures by Families and Individuals as a Share of Disposable Personal Income,” at www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/cpifoodandexpenditures/data/Expenditures_tables/table7.htm, updated 13 July 2011, from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), “Food Price Crisis and Financial Crisis Present Double Threat for Poor People,” press release (Washington, DC: 1 December 2008), and from Joachim von Braun, Food and Financial Crises: Implications for Agriculture and the Poor (Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2008), p. 5.

11. FAO, op. cit. note 2, pp. 44–47.

12. Ibid.; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Economic Surveys: India 2011 (Paris: 2011).

13. Save the Children, A Life Free from Hunger: Tackling Child Malnutrition (London: 2012).

14. Ibid., p. iv; International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) and Macro International, National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3), 2005–06: India: Volume I (Mumbai, India: IIPS, 2007), p. 269; Susan Horton, “Opportunities for Investments in Nutrition in Low-income Asia,” Asian Development Review, vol. 17, nos. 1, 2 (1999), pp. 246–73.

15. Adam Nossiter, “For Congo Children, Food Today Means None Tomorrow,” New York Times, 2 January 2012; Deutsche Welthungerhilfe, IFPRI, and Concern Worldwide, 2011 Global Hunger Index: The Challenge of Hunger: Taming Price Spikes and Excessive Food Price Volatility (Bonn, Washington, DC; and Dublin: 2011), p. 17.

16. GlobeScan Inc., “Multi-country Nutrition Poll 2011 Topline Report,” as commissioned by Save the Children (London: 17 February 2012), pp. 5, 11, 12.

17. U.N. Population Division, op. cit. note 5.

18. FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture 2009 (Rome: 2009), p. 12; USDA, op. cit. note 1.

19. Lester R. Brown, “Exploding U.S. Grain Demand for Automotive Fuel Threatens World Food Security and Political Stability,” Plan B Update (Washington, DC: Earth Policy Institute, 3 November 2006); Lester R. Brown, “Distillery Demand for Grain to Fuel Cars Vastly Understated: World May Be Facing Highest Grain Prices in History,” Plan B Update (Washington, DC: Earth Policy Institute, 4 January 2007); F.O. Licht, World Ethanol and Biofuels Report, vol. 10, no. 16 (24 April 2012), p. 323; USDA, op. cit. note 1; USDA, Feed Grains Database, electronic database, at www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/feed-grains-database.aspx, downloaded 16 May 2012.

20. Ward’s Automotive Group, World Motor Vehicle Data 2011 (Southfield, MI: 2011).

21. USDA, op. cit. note 1.

22. Countries with water bubbles from Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 43; from Isam E. Amin et al., “Major Problems Affecting the Principal Aquifers in Lebanon,” in Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 40, no. 6 (2008), p. 471; from Dale Lightfoot, Survey of Infiltration Karez in Northern Iraq: History and Current Status of Underground Aqueducts (Paris: UNESCO, September 2009); from “Afghanistan: Groundwater Overuse Could Cause Severe Water Shortage,” Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) News, 14 September 2008; and from U.N. Population Division, op. cit. note 5.

23. USDA, op. cit. note 1; John Briscoe and R. P. S. Malik, India’s Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006); U.N. Population Division, op. cit. note 5; USDA, Census of Agriculture: Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey (Washington, DC: various years).

24. Lester R. Brown, Increasing World Food Output: Problems and Prospects (Washington, DC: USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS), 1965), pp. 13–14; USDA, op. cit. note 1.

25. FAO, FAOSTAT, electronic database, at faostat.fao.org, updated 23 February 2012.

26. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 2; IPCC, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. A Special Report of Working Groups I and II of the IPCC (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 111–14.

27. John E. Sheehy, International Rice Research Institute, e-mail to Janet Larsen, Earth Policy Institute, 1 October 2002; David Lobell and Gregory Asner, “Climate and Management Contributions to Recent Trends in U.S. Agricultural Yields,” Science, vol. 299, no. 5609 (14 February 2003), p. 1,032; IPCC, Climate Change 2007, op. cit. note 26, p. 749.

28. USDA, op. cit. note 1; Brian Wright, International Grain Reserves and Other Instruments to Address Volatility in Grain Markets, Working Paper presented at the World Grain Forum 2009, St. Petersburg , Russia, 6–7 June 2009, p. 22.

29. USDA, op. cit. note 1; CBOT futures data from TradingCharts.com, Inc., op. cit. note 2; IMF, op. cit. note 2; Financial Times, “In Depth: The Global Food Crisis,” at www.ft.com/foodprices, updated 6 May 2008; USDA, ERS, “U.S. Rice Industry: Background Statistics and Information,” at www.ers.usda.gov/news/ricecoverage.htm, updated 30 April 2008; FAO, “Soaring Food Prices: Facts, Perspectives, Impacts and Actions Required,” paper presented at High-level Conference on World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy, Rome, 3–5 June 2008.

30. Office of the President, Republic of the Philippines, “RP Assured of 1.5 Million Metric Tons of Rice Supply from Vietnam Annually,” press release (Manila: 26 March 2008); USDA, op. cit. note 1; “Yemen to Seek Australian Food Cooperation,” WorldGrain.com, 19 May 2008; “Bahrain to Own Rice Farms in Thailand,” TradeArabia News Service, 30 May 2008; Javier Blas, “Nations Make Secret Deals Over Grain,” Financial Times, 10 April 2008.

31. GRAIN, Seized! The 2008 Land Grab for Food and Financial Security (Barcelona: October 2008); Joachim von Braun and Ruth Meinzen-Dick, “Land Grabbing” by Foreign Investors in Developing Countries, Policy Brief No. 13 (Washington, DC: IFPRI, April 2009); Klaus Deininger and Derek Byerlee, Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? (Washington, DC: World Bank, January 2011); George C. Schoneveld, The Anatomy of Large-scale Farmland Acquisitions in Sub-Saharan Africa, Working Paper 85 (Bogor, Indonesia: Center for International Forestry Research, 2011); Fred Pearce, The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012); U.N. World Food Programme, “Countries,” at www.wfp.org/countries, viewed 17 June 2012.

32. Deininger and Byerlee, op. cit. note 31, p. 51; USDA, op. cit. note 1; Karen Frenken and Jean-Marc Faurès, Irrigation Potential in Africa: A Basin Approach (Rome: FAO, 1997), at http://www.fao.org/docrep/w4347e/w4347e00.htm

33. Deininger and Byerlee, op. cit. note 31, p. 49; John Vidal, “Fears for the World’s Poor Countries as the Rich Grab Land to Grow Food,” (London) Guardian, 3 July 2009.

Copyright © 2012 Earth Policy Institute

 

 

Oil spill firm to pay $400 million to fix Gulf coast

The Deepwater Horizon spill has just provided a $400-million windfall for Louisiana's environment. Transocean, which worked with BP on the stricken Macondo well, pleaded guilty last week to a violation of the US Clean Water Act, and admitted that it was negligent in the 2010 spill.

The resultingmultimillion-dollar fine will be used to pay for a host of environmental projectsaround the Gulf of Mexico.

It is the second largest fine for environmental damage in history, after the $4.5-billion fine BP had to pay out for the same spill. Transocean has two years to pay up in full.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) will get $150 million, and another $150 million will go to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), a non-profit based in Washington DC. The NAS will use its portion to research oil-spill prevention and better ways to respond to spills. The NFWF's Timothy DiCintio says it will distribute its award between the affected Gulf Coast states, for ongoing remediation efforts such as marsh and wetland clean-up.

The remainder of the money will go directly to Louisiana's $50-billion Coastal Master Plan, which aims to restore the state's degraded coastline. The money will fund a host of projects, including restoring barrier island reefs and creating diversions on the Mississippi to repair eroded coasts.

"The way Louisiana looks at it, their coastal problems are so pervasive that the degradation from the spill was a final indignity," says DiCintio. The modifications should not only allow the state to rebuild after the lingering effects of the spill and hurricane Katrina, but also help the coast cope with future disasters. More

 

Overfishing Threatens Critical Link in the Food Chain - Earth Policy Institute

The fish near the bottom of the aquatic food chain are often overlooked, but they are vital to healthy oceans and estuaries. Collectively known as forage fish, these species—including sardines, anchovies, herrings, and shrimp-like crustaceans called krill—feed on plankton and become food themselves for larger fish, seabirds, and marine mammals.

Krill

Historically, people have eaten many of these fish, too, of course. But as demand for animal protein has soared over the last half-century, more and more forage fish have been caught to feed livestock and farmed fish instead of being eaten by people directly. A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that current fishing levels are dangerously high—both for the forage fish themselves and for the predators and industries that depend on them.

Found from the tropics to the poles, forage fish typically travel in dense schools of thousands or even millions of fish. While this is effective for guarding against ocean predators, it makes them easy prey for modern fishing fleets equipped with purse seine nets that can cinch up an entire school at once. What’s more, forage fish stocks are highly sensitive to environmental change and prone to population crashes, so fishing levels considered safe in good years can be disastrous in bad ones.

Many of the world’s largest fisheries focus on forage species, including Peruvian anchovy, Atlantic herring, and chub mackerel. Together, forage fish typically account for more than 30 percent of the 80 million tons of fish caught annually in the world’s oceans and estuaries. Roughly 9 of every 10 tons of forage fish hauled in are destined for the “reduction” factory, where they are cooked and pressed to extract the oil; what remains is then dried and milled into fishmeal, a high-protein brownish powder. About 6 million tons of fishmeal and 1 million tons of fish oil are produced each year. Nearly all of the fishmeal is fed to farmed fish, pigs, and poultry. The oil, high in omega-3 fatty acids that are prized for their health benefits, is a popular feed additive and is also used as a nutritional supplement for humans.

Notwithstanding their large contribution to the world fish catch, recent research suggests that forage fish are worth at least twice as much in the ocean as they are on the boat. In 2012 the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force, an international group of 13 distinguished marine and fisheries scientists, released the results of a three-year study in a report entitled Little Fish, Big Impact. The authors calculated that forage fish generate nearly $17 billion per year in reported catch—$5.6 billion for the small fish themselves and $11.3 billion in landings of the fish that eat them. This does not include the value of ecotourism for watching whales, which eat forage fish; the value of recreational sport fishing where forage fish are used as bait; or the important role of forage fish in keeping plankton under control.

Forage fish have a long history of being targeted for meal and oil. For example, Atlantic menhaden—herring and sardine relatives that migrate along the U.S. Atlantic coast—were first sent to processing factories in New England and the mid-Atlantic region in the mid-1800s to become fertilizer and a cheap substitute for whale oil, which was used in everything from leather tanning to cosmetics. Menhaden meal was later used in animal feed, beginning in the early 1900s. (Around that time, North Europeans started fishing Atlantic herring for the same purpose.) Still used mainly in feed but also in health supplements, Atlantic menhaden are one of the largest U.S. fisheries by weight today.

As more pork and poultry producers in the United States and Europe began using inexpensive fishmeal in feed rations, landings of forage fish grew. When the large-scale Peruvian anchovy fishery was launched in the 1950s and Peru and Chile began to aggressively exploit the productive waters along the western coast of South America, fishmeal use in feed began to spread worldwide. For decades now, the Peruvian anchovy has been not just the world’s largest source of fishmeal, but the world’s largest fishery overall, in some years topping 10 million tons. Peru alone has some 1,200 vessels supplying anchovy to 140 reduction factories, which produce meal and oil worth about $2 billion per year in exports.

While the Peruvian anchovy fishery is indeed lucrative, it is also, like many other forage fisheries, highly dependent on favorable environmental conditions. Especially during El Niño events, warm Pacific Ocean waters—sometimes with overfishing as an accomplice—have over the decades led to numerous anchovy population crashes and devastated harvests. In October 2012, Peru cut the allowed anchovy catch to its lowest level in 25 years after the fish’s population plummeted yet again, likely due to warmer ocean temperatures. With the anchovy supply thus restricted, the world price of fishmeal jumped to a record high by December. (See data.)

A half-century earlier, the young but already massive Peruvian anchovy fishery illustrated the ecological repercussions of heavy forage fishing. Unfavorably warm waters and an anchovy catch averaging 8 million tons per year depleted the food base for cormorants, gannets, and pelicans in the mid-1960s. Severe population declines among these birds ensued. Cormorants, almost entirely reliant on anchovies for food, saw an 89 percent drop from their historical average. Seabird populations in this ecosystem still have not recovered.

Worldwide, three quarters of the 72 marine ecosystems studied by the Lenfest Task Force contain predators dependent on forage fish for at least half their diet. Some predators, including the blue whale, Humboldt penguin, and yellowfin tuna, rely on forage fish for at least 75 percent of their diets. For these animals, plummeting prey populations can mean both impaired breeding and starvation.

The vast majority of the world’s forage fish stocks are either considered fully exploited, with no room for safely increasing the catch, or they are already overfished and in need of rebuilding. Given the climate sensitivity of forage fish and the key ecological role they play, the Lenfest authors recommend that, in general, catches should be half their current levels.

Reducing demand for fishmeal and oil will largely depend on the aquaculture sector. Twenty-five years ago, pigs and poultry accounted for 80 percent of world fishmeal consumption. By 2000, this share had dropped to 60 percent. But over the next decade, aquaculture production doubled, fishmeal prices rose nearly four-fold, and pig and poultry producers rapidly replaced fishmeal in feed with soybean meal. Today 68 percent of fishmeal goes to fish farms, as does 74 percent of fish oil.

There are some encouraging signs on this front, however. For example, nearly every major type of farmed fish—from salmon to carp—has seen significant reductions in the fishmeal content of feed since the mid-1990s as proteins from plants (particularly soybeans) and livestock and poultry byproducts have increasingly become suitable alternatives. Between 1995 and 2007, the fishmeal content in shrimp feed dropped from 28 percent to 18 percent. The drop was even more dramatic for salmon, from 45 percent to 24 percent. The recent surge in fishmeal prices is forcing even more feed switching.

There has also been a rise in the use of seafood industry byproducts in fish feed. In 2010, one third of fishmeal production came from fish trimmings and other food fish production wastes. On the other hand, finding substitutes for fish oil rich in omega-3s has been more difficult and may prove a bigger obstacle to lowering the forage fish catch in line with scientific advice.

Some scientists and chefs have promoted greater consumption of forage fish directly as food, noting that this is much more efficient—and more accessible to poorer consumers—than eating them indirectly through farm-raised salmon or shrimp. Forage fish already provide an important protein source in many low-income countries around the world, especially in coastal Africa. In fact, they account for over half the supply of food fish in 36 countries, including the Maldives, the Philippines, and Ghana. And direct consumption is on the rise in some countries. For example, Peruvians ate 190,000 tons of anchovies in 2010—19 times as much as in 2006. More