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Saving Fish By Farming Them

A major turning point in human history was reached in 2014. That was the first year that people ate more farmed fish than wild, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization announced last week in its biennial “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture” report.

We humans still caught more wild fish (measured by weight) than we farmed in 2014, but about 12 percent of fish production went to non-people-food uses such as fish meal, which is in turn was fed mostly to farm animals, including fish. The FAO predicted that aquaculture will surpass wild-caught in terms of overall production in 2021, adding:

This development highlights a new era, indicating that aquaculture will increasingly be the main driver of change in the fisheries and aquaculture sector.

It’s been quite a few years since humans made the equivalent switch from gathering berries to farming crops, and from hunting wild mammals and birds to raising domesticated ones. The advent of agriculture enabled the rise of civilization; subsequent revolutions in agricultural productivity have made it possible for the earth to support a population of 7.4 billion people…

Read the full article at Bloomberg.com.

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