Aquaculture has been a successful system for increasing world seafood supply, is expected to outgrow capture fisheries in volumes, and follow the increasing demand from an ever growing population (with continuous increased proportion of middle class residing in urban areas). It is also a very energy-efficient way to produce animal protein, and when operations are within the boundaries of environmental sustainability, aquaculture is bound to be embraced by food security developers concerned with sustainable development. This calls for a bright future, with continuous high growth rates similar to what we have seen the last decades. In order to keep pace with demand-growth growth rates must remain high.
In recent presentations* the economist and professor Ragnar Tveteraas have presented FAO-data and other more recent data that questions the assumption of “strong future growth of aquaculture”, documenting what may seem like a general slowdown, even stagnation for important aquaculture industries. Output is growing from the global aquaculture production system, but at a lower pace. Furthermore, he shows how many individual aquaculture sectors tend to reach a production plateau after some time followed by stagnation and even dramatic decline. If this is possibly bad news within the overall demand panorama, and should challenge our problem definition and knowledge search.
In particular there are key two areas or factors, which distinguishes aquaculture from other industries, that are challenging 1) negative externalities related to disease and fish health (decreasing the return to scale), and 2) market-failure of aquaculture-sector R&D in terms the ability to appropriate value from private-sector R&D-investments. There is an important role for politics in aquaculture, a role of governance that seem weakly understood in practice – even in Europe.
After many years of booming and busting (fall, even death) among different industries within the global aquaculture sector there should be opportunities to synthesize experiences to better understand the role of key issues like innovation, ‘governance’ (not only upstream, but along the entire value chain and in the broadest sense), technology development and R&D. There must be some ways of implementing aquaculture (and other related 'unborn' activities like marine agriculture) that are more efficient and robust over time than others. Understanding development and governance regimes would facilitate growth of smaller scale operations into larger scale industries with the sought-for ability to supply the ever-increasing demand. The inclusion of governance-issues along the value chain, and understanding these issues in broader sense therefore seem integral to most of the issues presented in the HLPE scoping document.
If indeed there is a tendency of stagnation, research questions should start with a Why (rather than a How). The answers might even call for a research program on it’s own.
* Latest in January 2013 at the Aquaculture Symposium arranged in Oslo, Norway, by The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, The Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences and The Research Council of Norway
Arne Sørvig