GREEN farmed fish may soon be on the supermarket slab. A league table that ranks the sustainability of fisheries by where the food for fish farms is sourced will help consumers assess the environmental impact of seafood.
Farmed fish are fed oils and meal made from other fish, including anchovy, herring and sardines. This has led to declines in wild populations, and growing criticism of salmon and shrimp farms over the impact their use of feed has on marine ecosystems.
Now the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, a non-profit group based in San Francisco, has published a sustainability league table for the 22 fish stocks most harvested for fish oil and fishmeal. It estimates that 67 per cent of the global catch of such fish is from sustainable sources.
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The league table could help fish farms manage their feed supplies and so qualify for schemes which certify to consumers that their produce is sustainable. Several such schemes are in the works, and the first could launch as early as 2012.
But Jennifer Jacquet of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre in Vancouver, Canada, says that the partnership鈥檚 work, though commendable, does not get to the heart of the issue. 鈥淚t takes around 6 tonnes of wild fish to reduce to 1 tonne of fishmeal, and then anything from 1.5 to 3 tonnes of meal to produce 1 tonne of farmed salmon,鈥� she says. 鈥淧roducing fishmeal and fish oil for fish farming is in itself a waste of tasty fish that could be eaten directly.鈥�