"One of Europe’s biggest aquaculture industries is linked to overfishing, pollution, food insecurity and labor abuses."
"In May, the Hellenic Aquaculture Producers Organization gathered in Athens to promote the industry as the future of sustainable food security. Flanked by industry titans, the European commissioner for fisheries and oceans, Costas Kadis, framed aquaculture as a solution to the pressures of climate change, pollution and overfishing. “In the European Union, aquaculture is at the epicenter of our priorities,” he said.
The industry group’s chairman, Apostolos Touralias, went one step further: “Aquaculture is the most sustainable form of animal protein,” he said. “Aquaculture needs less space, less feed, less freshwater. It produces the lowest carbon footprint regarding all other sectors.”
But not everyone agrees with the industry’s assessment of itself.
“The aquaculture industry’s sales pitch is flat wrong,” said Daniel Pauly, project director of the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia. The most popular farmed seafood are fed wild fish—the exact livestock aquaculture claims to be saving. That’s accelerating ocean depletion, not slowing it, he explained."
SEE ALSO:
"The Greek National Park Suffocated by Fish Farming" (Inside Climate News)
