1199 words
Fish, Food and Energy: balancingour approaches to meeting growing demand.
Meeting our growing need for food and energy will require innovation across a range of food sectors; fisheries and aquaculture provide one powerful example of the benefits.
Bina Royis a busy woman. Not only does she juggle the multiple demands of a wife, mother, farmer and fisher, she is also Secretary of the Malihat Beel village fisheries management committee.Over the course of the past six years Mrs Roy has led efforts to improve management of the local fishery, increase fish production, improve nutrition, and raise income in her community. Here in Malihat Beel and in over 1200 other villages on Bangladesh’s lowland floodplain, the local communityset out in 2002to increase fish production to complement their traditional rice crop and wild fish catch. Today fish production has increased by nearly 20% in these villages, yielding over 1200 tonnes of fish a year and generating income of US$0.9 million.
The experience of Bina Royand the community based fisheries management work in Bangladesh highlights how many millions of the world’s poor secure food and income through an integrated approach to food production. This practice of catching or farming, selling andeating fish to complement the rice staple is repeated across much of Asia. The Bangladeshis have a saying - “we are made of rice and fish” - a phrase that sums up the practice well. Bangladeshis get 63% of their animal protein from fish, as do 58% of Indonesians, and the figure rises to 75% in Cambodia. Simply put, fish is an essential part of the diets of millions of the world’s poor.
As the price of the world’s food staples and the costs of energy haverocketed,the threat of food shortages in Asia and Africa is very real. In response there is now growing international attention to meeting the challenge of increasingsustainable – and energy efficient – supplies of food forboth the short and long-term. As the international community works to address this challenge we will do well to consider the example of Bina Roy and others in Bangladesh, and ask where investments in fisheries and aquaculture can improve both nutrition and incomes.
Wild fisheries still provide us with more than half of the world’s fish harvest, but most of these stocks are either fully exploited, overfished or depleted. Better management of wild fisheries is therefore essential, and special attention needs to be given to the small-scale fisheries that employ over 95% of the world’s fishers and sustain the lives of hundreds of millions of the poor who are most vulnerable to the rising price of food. Without healthy fisheries millions of the most food insecure will have less fish to eat and less money from fish sales to buy cheaper staple foods. That these fisheries are also much more energy efficient than their industrial counterparts is an added bonus.
But to meet the world’s growing demand for fish we must not only sustain the catch from the wild; we must also increase environmentally friendly and energy-efficient aquaculture. Fish farming in man-made ponds or in cages, has expanded since 1970 at an average rate of 8.9% to become the world’s fastest growing method of food production. Today aquaculture produces half of all food fish, a figure that will continue to grow as demand rises and technologies are developed to respond.
For sub-Saharan Africa, where the World Food Programme lists 22 countries as short of food, the shortage of fish is especially acute. While two hundred million Africans get 22-70% of their dietary animal protein from fish, sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where scarcity of fishhas meant that supply cannot keep pace with the growing demand. Per capita fish consumption fell between 1973 and 1997 from 9 kilograms per year to 7 kilograms, or less than half of the world average; and consumption remains at this low level today. Fortunately there is enormous scope for expanding aquaculture production in Africa. While fish farms currently supply less than 2% of African fish production, large parts of the continent have the ecological, institutional and economic conditions needed for aquaculture to grow. Just 5% of this suitable area would produce enough extra fish to meet the minimum needs of Africa’s growing population until 2020. The technologies to achieve this exist, the need now is to apply these effectively.
In the search for energy efficient food production fish farming has several advantages. When farmed extensively, several fish species need no external feeds, and produce good harvests relying solely on manure, kitchen waste, leaves, and crop residues. When farmed intensively fish needless feed than warm-blooded livestock:100 kilograms of feed will produce as much as 75 kilograms of catfish meat but only 50 kilograms of chicken meat or 13 kilograms of beef.Some species of farmed fish grow from fingerling to market size in 4-5months.
Farmed fish also compares favourablywhen we consider water needs, counter-intuitive as that may be. The water cost of a kilogram of fish varies but can be as little as 2,000 litres. This istwice that of wheat, but similar to that of broiler chickens or milk, 40% that ofrice or cheese, 10% that of coffee and 2% that of grain-fed beef. Further, rainwater stored in fish ponds is often available for irrigation after other sources have dried up, and water percolating from fish pondscan help recharge local aquifers. The WorldFishCenterand partners in southern Africa have shown that smallholder farmsin southern Africawho integrated aquaculture with cropsand livestock harvested18% more during drought than their neighbours.
Almost all Low Income Food Deficit Countries with high dependence on fish will need to develop their aquaculture sectors in the coming decade. For many, integrating aquaculture into agricultural production systems is a highly effective strategy to both increase food security and family income at small cost. Over large parts of South and Southeast Asiapoor farmers and rural families have turned abandoned ponds,roadside ditches, seasonally flooded fields, and other bodies of water as small as 300 square meters in size into productive aquaculture enterprises. In Bangladesh, introducing low-cost, low-input integrated aquaculture-agriculture has increased fish yields from 500 kilograms per hectare to 4 tons per hectare.And this integrated approach has benefited crops as well by recycling nutrients and water suchthat the entire farm enterprise becomes more efficient and profitable. The same is true in Africa, where farmers who integrate aquaculture get10 percent more from their farms and,use 50 percent fewer inputs than conventional farms, and lose less nitrogen from the soil. As a result of this approach farm incomes in Malawi have risen 28 percent, family fish consumption risen 160 percent, and child malnutrition has been reduced by 15 percent.
As the international community gears up to face the challenges of feeding our growing population in a truly cost-effective manner, we need to learn from the experience of Bina Roy and thousands more fishers and farmers in Asia and Africa. While care is needed to understand where, why and how these technologies can work and make a difference, these examples show that they can. They now need to be multiplied if the world’s poor are to have sustainable access to a quality diet, and diversified incomes. Only if we do so will there continue to be both rice and fish!
Ends