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The Ethics and Sustainability of Capture Fisheries and Aquaculture

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Abstract

The global seafood industry (capture fisheries and aquaculture) is a vital source of food, income, livelihoods, and culture. Seafood demand is steadily rising due to growth in the global human population, affluence, and per capita consumption. Seafood supply is also growing, despite declining wild fish stocks, with phenomenal advances in aquaculture, that is, the cultivation of aquatic organisms. Aquaculture supplied 42 % of the world’s fish in 2012 and is forecast to eclipse capture fisheries production by 2030. The balance between these two seafood production systems has profound implications for global food security, income distribution, and ecological sustainability. Here, a qualitative analysis of the ethics and sustainability of capture fisheries and aquaculture is presented. An innovative practical ethics approach is introduced which adapts the ethical matrix, a conceptual tool for analyzing the wellbeing, autonomy, and justice of different interest groups, and Rapfish, a rapid appraisal technique used to evaluate the sustainability of fisheries along six performance modalities, including ethics. Using case studies of global large- and small-scale capture fisheries and generalized carnivorous and omnivorous aquaculture systems, I show that human institutions and social actors interact in complex governance processes to influence seafood ethics and sustainability.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Matthias Kaiser for inviting me to attend the 11th EurSafe Congress in Uppsala, Sweden, September 2013, where this work was first presented and for his detailed and insightful comments on the manuscript. I am especially grateful to Tony Pitcher for stimulating discussions on this research and for providing Figs. 1 and 3. The Rapfish attributes have been revised in collaboration with him, Chloé Ormand, Nicolas Talloni-Alvarez, and Szymon Surma and will be detailed in a forthcoming paper. I thank Divya Varkey for her suggestion to include future generations in the combined ethical matrix-Rapfish. I cannot conclude this without thanking guest editors Helena Röcklinsberg and Per Sandin for their invitation to contribute to this special issue and Helena’s helpful comments with regards to fish welfare, as well as the comments of an anonymous reviewer.

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  1. Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, 2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Mimi E. Lam

  2. Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, University of British Columbia, 2207 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Mimi E. Lam

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Lam, M.E. The Ethics and Sustainability of Capture Fisheries and Aquaculture. J Agric Environ Ethics 29, 35–65 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-015-9587-2

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