The UN body of FAO warns that climate change and overfishing would drive fishing – reliant community in the developing countries to be more vulnerable. Fisheries authorities must do more to understand and prepare for rising temperatures. To cope with climate change and overfishing, fishing practices must be widely implemented and management plans should be expanded.
Aquaculture currently contributes 47 percent of total fish consumed by human as food. Whereas, many fisheries are being exploited at the top range of their productive capacity. The areas with the highest proportions of fully-exploited fish stocks are the Northeast Atlantic Ocean, the Western Indian Ocean and the Northwest Pacific Ocean.
Aquaculture continues to be the fastest-growing animal food producing sector and is poised to provide half of all fish consumed worldwide, finds the FAO report, adding that future developments should move towards hatchery-based aquaculture, cutting dependence on wild stocks. With aquaculture set to be the basis of all future growth in global seafood production, the global environment organization WWF responded to the new report with an urgent call to put aquaculture on a more sustainable basis.
"The dramatic growth in aquaculture makes it more and more urgent to ensure that aquaculture becomes more sustainable and that supplying the stock and the feed for fish farming becomes less of a burden on traditional fisheries. Coastal aquaculture must also stop making inroads into fish habitat such as mangrove areas, it must become less polluting and less of a disease risk and it must be carried out without making communities more vulnerable to natural disasters. They warn that conversion of wetlands and mangrove forests into shrimp ponds contributes to climate change by releasing stored carbon in the soil into the atmosphere and by nullifying the mangroves' function of sequestering carbon.
On the other hand, with long roots that shelter juvenile fish and protect coastlines from erosion, hurricanes, storm surges, and tsunami, mangrove trees grow in the intertidal areas and estuary mouths between land and water.
"Producers want to see some change in the industry, They are willing to change farming practices to protect the environment. Shrimp dialogue participants have identified some key impacts they want to try to minimize - water pollution, salt water from shrimp farms can seep into the groundwater; chemicals and antibiotics; destruction of natural habitat; and the clearing of mangrove forests."
The aquaculture’s standards would ne soon produced to guide industries and farmers. This is an unprecedented effort to ensure that future aquaculture is environmentally sustainable, and well-positioned to meet the growing demand for seafood worldwide."These new standards will raise the bar in the industry, giving consumers assurance that their food purchases are good for the environment.
For more detail: http://www.fao.org/docrep/011/i0250e/i0250e00.htm
