PB,
As an engineer, I would have thought that you would have thought through the fish farming issues a bit more critically. Let's look at just one species, Atlantic salmon. My favorite response to farming fish so far has come from Alaska. They have banned the practice outright, fearing contamination of native stocks such as is happening in B.C., on the east coast of the U.S. and in Scotland and Norway. Furthermore, there is a significant issue with the impracticality of the industry, which requires large trawls of forage fish in order to turn this biomass into fish meal for the pens. Furthermore, antibiotics used in the pens have destroyed local ecology in a number of bays, fiords and inlets. Escaped fish have interbred with local populations of Atlantic salmon with unknown consequences and disease is a constant issue in the pens. Oh, and did I mention that farmed fish is twice as fatty as wild salmon? Making the nutritional value a questionable proposition.
Other fisheries, such as catfish and shrimp have been noted for the destruction of mangrove swamps across the planet, destroying the very nurseries that wild fish and shellfish stocks rely on for replenishment.
Altogether, in the race for farmed fish production, the planet has suffered a lot of ecological damage that simply isn't accounted for by governments, economists and the businessmen who despoil the natural world for the sake of greed. |
