For 3 billion people around the world, seafood provides a significant source of protein and nutrition.
But recent studies show that 33% of wild fisheries are overfished, while another 60% are fished at their maximum capacity.
In fact, over half the seafood we eat– from finfish and shellfish to seaweed and algae–
isn’t caught in the wild. It’s grown through aquaculture, or aquatic farming.
Farmed seafood is one of the fastest-growing food industries, expanding in volume by 5.8% each year.
But different methods of aquaculture come with different advantages and issues– some of which echo the serious problems we’ve seen in industrial agriculture.
So how can we avoid repeating the mistakes we’ve made on land, at sea? What aquaculture approaches are we currently using,
and what does a sustainable way to farm the ocean really look like? One of the most common aquaculture methods involves large pens made of nets,
where fish are farmed offshore in floating cages roughly 1000 square meters in size. Commonly employed off the coast of Chile and in the fjords of Norway,
these fish, like many industrially farmed animals, occupy stressful, overcrowded pens.
