Aquaculture
Aquaculture
The right way
or the wrong way?
A few months ago, West Hawaii Today had an article about the National Restaurant Association top trends in the restaurant industry. The number one trend decided by more than 1,800 professional chefs nationally is locally sourced meat and fish. When it comes to wild fresh fish, Hawaii chefs prepare and showcase better than anyone. After talking to many local chefs, I believe the premier cuisine in Hawaii is the large selection of wild fresh fish we have to offer. I doubt the island’s tourists come to Hawaii knowingly to eat chemically treated and soy-fed farm raised fish. The NRA defines locally sourced as organic, fresh, natural and healthy.
The University at Albany did the first global study on salmon, just published in Science, and by far the largest and most comprehensive done to date, found significantly more concentration of cancer causing substances (PCBs, dioxins, dieldrin and toxaphene) in farmed salmon compared to wild salmon. My question is what about all other offshore farmed ocean fish that are fed the same or similar fish food? You can only hope that some of these researchers will begin to test all ocean farmed fish for some of these same toxicants.
It is well-known that intensive fish culture has been involved in the introduction and or amplification of pathogens and disease in wild fish population (Holmer M. et al. 2010). Actually, it is easy to understand. When a wild fish becomes ill, it is likely to starve or be eaten by predators. But sea cage fish are protected and fed daily, living a long time and retransmitting disease and parasites to other fish in the cage and wild fish. Farm fish are known to escape, impacting wild fish by increasing competition for food and breeding sites, and reducing the fitness of wild fish by interbreeding (Hindar et al. 2006).
There are healthy and clean aquacultures, which I support, such as filter feeders (clams, scallops, oysters and mussels), recirculating aquaculture systems, aquaponics and marine-based integrated multitrophic aquaculture similar to our loko ia. In November, Professor Roz Naylor (Stanford) and others released a study on these aquacultures titled “Searching For Solutions In Aquaculture; Charting A Sustainable Course.”
There are no easy solutions to protect the wild fish we love to eat, but let’s not desecrate what we have by choosing large-scale, open-ocean pens, the most harmful form of aquaculture.
Tom Kapp
Waimea