Some Thoughts on “Feeding the World” through Industrial Aquaculture
Mike Skladany
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
2105 First Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404
mskladany@iatp.org
Modern aquaculture has always been rationalized by the promise of a better future
best captured through the ubiquitous association of the word “potential” with aquaculture.
In a biological sense, aquaculture is the controlled cultivation of aquatic organisms. In a
broader sociological sense, aquaculture is a social activity that entails long-standing and
more recently novel forms of production and consumption of aquatic organisms that are
embedded in cultural systems of ever-changing human meaning. Materially, aquaculture
involves increasingly well-defined associations and interactions between people, the
environment and aquatic organisms within specific material relations and organizational
contexts.
In short, much like other forms of human activity and organization, aquaculture is
a reflection of its social history and context. In this regard, there is no definitive social or
environmental history of aquaculture. However, aquaculturists invariably refer to
innumerable anecdotal and convoluted social and historical dimensions of aquaculture in
order to advance an economic rationale for legitimating mass aquaculture production and
consumption of aquatic organisms (Skladany 2000). In what follows, I briefly highlight
1) an important sociohistorical transition era pertaining to the emergence of industrial
aquaculture and 2) assess some of the social consequences that have become manifest by
the new order of industrial aquaculture development.
Industrial aquaculture is a very recent historical phenomenon. Lacking a
definitive history, the universe of aquaculture contains innumerable stories (e.g., Bardach
et al, 1972; Bardach 1997). These stories draw links between “traditional” or
“subsistence” cultivation to modern commercial, industrial, biotechnological and
genetically engineered forms of market-oriented economic growth (e.g., Ben-Yami 1986;
Donaldson 1997). The sweeping appeal to “technological progress” has underscored
accounts of, and justifications for this continuous transformation.
In tropical Asia, Latin America and Africa, modern aquaculture evolved out of
dramatic political, natural resource crises and international agricultural development
programs that occurred after the Second World War. Brought on by a neo-Malthusian
perception of growing population pressure, declines in capture fisheries, resource
degradation, low agricultural productivity and within the political context of the Cold
War, early international developers and agencies from the North envisioned a “smallscale” aquaculture that would feed impoverished inland populations, promote social and
economic well-being, and augment production from the world’s oceans and critically
situated inland water resources (FAO 1976).
In temperate North America and Europe, industrial aquaculture emerged from a
sociohistorical context that included capture and recreational fisheries, agricultural
diversification and more recently national policies and significant bureaucratic
interventions (see Bauin 1986) to promote economic growth. As Chew (1993) noted,
North American aquaculture occurs during a period of complex social organization and
structural change that dwarfs earlier capture fisheries and agricultural development
efforts. As a result, temperate aquaculture production has lagged behind the leading
producer countries of Asia and Latin America. At the same time, many affluent countries
in the North depend on imports of farmed fish and shrimp to meet what is designated as
an almost magical consumer preference for these commodities. This organizational
situation however, is undergoing far reaching structural change as aquaculture becomes
identified as another new engine of economic growth for countries such as Canada and
the United States. In both cases, what we are witnessing is the full manifestation of
international and national development policies begun in the 1980s that best equate with
the rubric of globalization.
In regards to aquaculture, the above developments have brought together
conflated imagery, perceptions, language and more concretely --- policy directions.
Industrial aquaculture advocates still co-opt the earlier small-scale rhetoric of “feeding
the world” to justify global monocultures of shrimp and salmon. Indeed, the original
impetus was to 1) feed people in impoverished areas of the world, 2) take pressure off
capture fisheries resources, and 3) generate alternative sources of social and economic
well being. The basis for this earlier vision was consistent with the Schumacherian
(1973), New Alchemist (1976) and appropriate technology movements (Winner 1986).
However, with the confluence of mid-1980s social and economic forces --- global
restructuring, trade liberalization, technological advancement, economic decline and the
concentration of power --- a broad political-economic move to seek market solutions for
social problems gained a political consensus whereby aquaculture became an exclusive
industrial growth strategy. At present, industrial aquaculture of salmon and shrimp, the
first global aquaculture systems are the direct consequences of neo-liberal market policies
rationalized by an almost exclusive appeal to technoscientific progress. The sociological
problem with technological choice so often ignored is that the decision to farm, for
example salmon is also a simultaneous political choice (Middendorf et al. 2000).
As a political choice with social consequences, the debate on industrial
aquaculture tends to 1) ignore public input, 2) frames what amounts to be a social
problem as one that can only be addressed by a “mystified” science stripped of social
context and immune from public scrutiny, 3) privatizes what was once held in common
and 4) passes environmental, economic and social costs back onto society. Clearly, these
machinations are at odds with the fuller aspirations of a free democratic society. New
questions and lines of inquiry need to be opened that address the social requirement for,
and value of industrial aquaculture from a more robust and socially sound standpoint.
References
Bardach, J.E., J.H.Ryther and W.O. McLarney. 1972. Aquaculture: The Farming and
Husbandry of freshwater and Marine Organisms. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Bardach, J. 1997. Sustainable Aquaculture. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Bauin, Serge. 1986. “Aquaculture: A Field by Bureaucratic Fiat.” In M.Callon. J.Law and
Arie Rip (eds). Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of
Science in the Real World. London: The Macmillan Press. Pp. 124-141. NOTE: This is
a classic, much underutilized social study of aquaculture science that advances the
characterization of aquaculture as bureaucratic intervention.
Ben-Yami, M. 1986. “Aquaculture: The Importance of Knowing It’s Limits.” Ceres
19(4):15-19.
Chew, Kenneth K. 1993. “U.S. Aquaculture: Lessons from the Past.” World Aquaculture.
24(1): 35-38.
Donaldson, Edward. 1997. “The Role of Biotechnology in Sustainable Aquaculture.” In
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FAO. 1976. “FAO Technical Conference on Aquaculture.” FAO Fisheries Report No.
188. Kyoto, Japan, 26 May – 2 June 1976. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of
the United Nations. NOTE: * This conference is generally recognized as the first world
technical conference on Aquaculture, coming 10 years after a first gathering in 1966.
Middendorf, Gerad, Mike Skladany, Elizabeth Ransom and Lawrence Busch. 2000.
“New Agricultural Biotechnologies: The Struggle for Democratic Choice.” In F.
Magdoff, F. Buttel and J. Bellamy Foster (eds.). Hungry for Profit: Food, Agriculture
and Ecology. New York: Monthly Review. Pp. 107-123.
New Alchemists. 1977. The Book of the New Alchemists. New York: E.P.Dutton.
Schumacher, E.F. 1973. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New
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Skladany, Mike. 2000. “Sociology, Science and Technology: The Case of Transgenic
Fish Research and Development.” Ph.D Dissertation. Department of Sociology,
Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1111.
Winner, Langdon. 1986. The Whale and the Reactor: The Search for Limits in the
Age of High Technology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.