Commercial fish farming has been hyped worldwide as a way to provide more protein for hungry humans and to ease the pressure on wild fish resources. Industrial ocean aquaculture, however, hasn’t found a very comfortable place within the global food chain. The environmental devastation of many coastal zones, customer resistance to antibiotic – and artificial food coloring-laden fillets, concern about public and indigenous coastal and ocean access, and the questionable resource mathematics of using up to 5 pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed fish have all contributed to concerns about the real viability of industrial fish farms.
The resource equation is even more crazily skewed in the case of “ranched” tuna (so called because they are collected from the wild and then fed in anchored pens), which require up to 40 pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of tuna flesh.
Other industrial fish farms have tried bizarre, un-natural and ultimately unpopular approaches to the fundamental problem of feeding farmed fish, such as the New Zealand and Canadian practice of feeding processed chicken feathers to farmed salmon.
Still, the growth of the industry has been dramatic over the past 25 years, and up to one-third of the fish that humans now consume was produced by industrial fish farms.
Hawai’i has been a key testing ground for fish farming technologies since 1999, when the state legislature amended laws that had once protected Hawai’i’s ocean and submerged lands. These changes, allowing the state to begin leasing waters for commercial aquaculture, opened the door to industrial fish farms in Hawai’i. With less than 200 acres currently utilized for this purpose, Hawai‘i stands poised to expand ocean-based fish farming by 900% over the next five years.
Faced with the imminence of this drastic increase, a coalition of Native Hawaiian and environmentalist organizations have joined forces to promote viable and sustainable alternatives for fish production in Hawai’i.
The newly-formed group, Pono Aquaculture Alliance (PAA), held a press conference in Honolulu recently to outline their position: that traditional Hawaiian coastal fish ponds and land-based recirculating aquaculture/ aquaponic systems are significantly more sustainable, environmentally responsible and culturally appropriate than industrial ocean fish farms.
“Loko ‘ia, traditional fishponds, have been part of sustainable food production in Hawai’i for centuries,” said Miwa Tamanaha, Executive Director of KAHEA, one of the allied organisations. “Now is the time to learn the lessons of the past that they have to teach us for the future, and to protect the future of our oceans from the contamination, privatisation and loss of public access that comes with commercial open ocean fish farms.”
PAA members contend that traditional Polynesian approaches to raising fish holds great promise, and there’s a lot of substance behind that assertion.
Although many cultures around the world practiced aquaculture to some degree, native Hawaiians, with their traditional extensive systems of loko ‘ia, have been noted as some of the best practitioners of successful fish farming on the planet. Old Hawai’i had an aquaculture system that was both technologically advanced and operationally simple. It has been estimated that before Western contact, there were almost 500 fishponds throughout Hawai’i that produced nearly two million pounds of fish and seafood by applying natural approaches.
Not traditionally considered as a distinct practice of “aquaculture,” these highly productive fishponds were part of a larger system of ahupua‘a (traditional Hawaiian land divisions) management that encompassed sustainable resource management from the peaks of the highest mountains to the coastal waters. The ponds were generally constructed in sheltered areas, with protective seawalls (kuapa) built out from the shoreline, enclosing shallow bodies of water.
The seawalls, made of basalt and coral, usually contained sluice gates that served to regulate the pond’s water temperature, depth and salinity, as well as allowing smaller fish to pass through to naturally stock the pond.
One key element in the success of these fishponds is that the species of fish chosen to be raised were those that feed directly on plants – primarily algae – thus utilizing a much shorter food chain, indicating that Hawaiian fishponds were operated within a framework of a sophisticated understanding of marine food chain dynamics.
PAA also supports another alternativeapproach: land-based recirculating aquaculture/ aquaponic systems, which have been widely praised as eco-friendly. This is another traditional fish production method, in this case originating from Asia. The concept of developing aquaculture farming systems in tandem with agriculture is gaining ground worldwide. These systems, such as those now operating in Hawai’i, produce very little waste, as they are designed to benefit from each other’s byproducts: fish waste fertilizes the plants, which then filter the water and provide necessary nutrients back to the fish.
“This is not a ‘not in my backyard’ kind of initiative,” says Isaac Harp, a native Hawaiian fisherman who works with KAHEA. “It’s a ‘not on this planet’ issue. We’re trying to create a model for appropriate approaches to aquaculture worldwide, especially in Pasifika.”
PAA is eager to connect with other groups from Pacific island nations who are interested in advocating for these kinds of approaches to producing more fish for their people.
“The Western, profit-motivated approach to economic development inserted into an island culture can be disastrous to that culture, especially in the area of food production,” says Kale Gumapac of the Kanaka Council, another PAA member.
Given the precarious state of food security in Pasifika, as underscored by the April 2010 Pacific Food Summit in Vanuatu, a Pacific-wide alliance of advocates for these kinds of truly sustainable aquaculture approaches could be a significant move towards addressing the consensus summit goals of ensuring that all Pacific peoples have access to safe, nutritious, local food.
While a few island communities have found a limited degree of success with small-scale farming of imported tilapia, the highly competitive fish has crowded out important native species. Several Pacific island governments now regard the eradication of tilapia as a priority fisheries project.
Fish culture in Pasifika has been practiced for centuries, and there are relics of ancient fishponds that still exist on many islands throughout the region. Traditional culture relied on native species (particularly mullet and milkfish) and the natural productivity of the ponds to provide food for the fish.
“Most industrial ocean fish farming operations are focused on producing fish to export, using a profit-driven, unsustainable approach,” says Harp. “That just isn’t appropriate for a Pacific island marine eco-system. We need to get back to basics, feeding our island people with local fish species using truly sustainable approaches.
Our ancestors knew how to do this right. We just need to remember.”
