« March 2007 Table of Contents 
Editor's Note: A sustainable debate
By Fiona Robinson, Editor in Chief
March 01, 2007
MPastime: Cooking at home
with family and friends
Cuisine: Mediterranean
Game fish: Grouper
Hobby: Collecting vinyl records
Music genre: "I love it all!"
Sports teams: N.Y. Knicks
and Orlando Magic
any seafood-related conversations these days revolve around
sustainability. Not a day passes without
someone calling or
e-mailing me about sustainable seafood. In January, I attended
the Seafood Choices Alliance Seafood Summit for the first time
and was pleasantly surprised to see so many seafood companies
and non-profit groups in one venue. This would have been taboo
in 1997, when the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever launched the
Marine Stewardship Council. Clearly, a lot has changed in the
past decade.
For many years, the industry and NGOs have had competing
views of what sustainable seafood means. I thought I had a
pretty good understanding of the issue until I went to several
scientific
seminars during the summit. One session outlined a
Dalhousie University student's research on the lifecycle
assessment for producing organic farmed salmon in British
Columbia. The research included a detailed analysis of the
energy required to harvest fish to produce fishmeal for farmed
salmon. I only could comprehend about half the discussion, and
began to realize why defining farmed fish - or wild - as
sustainable is so complex.
Fishmeal is the sticking point for most NGOs to ever fully
accept farmed fish as sustainable, or even organic for that
matter. I listened to one tilapia farmer discuss a
sustainability program at a Honduras fish farm. The company has
taken an entire village that relied solely on forestry for its
livelihood, which was leading to destruction of all wildlife in
the area, and completely turned it around. Schools, medical
care and machinery that runs entirely on bio-fuel made from
fish sludge were just a few points of the complete program. But
in a later discussion about the farm with someone from the
environmental camp, I learned the tilapia farm would never be
considered sustainable by NGOs because the feed it uses comes
from Cargill. All of that time, energy and money spent on
reducing its impact on the environment and supporting an entire
village and the farm would still not be considered sustainable?
I was dumbfounded.
It would be naïve to say the industry is completely onboard
with how the Seafood Choices Alliance and other NGOs are
defining sustainable seafood. And considering the tilapia farm
comment, it should remain skeptical. One of the largest hurdles
to any NGO accepting farmed seafood as sustainable is fish
feed. If all the greenies had their way, farmed fish would eat
100 percent soy-based feed. But a fish that tastes like shoe
leather is not one I'd want to eat, and neither would
consumers.