Success Stories In Asian Aquaculture - Library - Network of ...

10 Synthesis and Lessons Learned189Apart from the direct contribution of aquaculture to the human food basket, ithas equally contributed to food security and poverty alleviation through theprovision of many millions of livelihoods dependent directly and indirectly onactivities of the sector. In many leading aquaculture nations, it has begun tobypass the contribution to the GDP from capture fisheries, and equally its processingsector developments are a significant avenue for employment of rural women,empowering their status in the households and in the community at large.Aquaculture has now reached an important position as a globally significantcontributor to food production. However, this development has had its critics, bothfrom a primary resource use as well as consumer and social responsibility viewpoints.A closer scrutiny of these criticisms will reveal that these are mainlydirected toward those aquafarming systems that tend to produce high valued,carnivorous species, such as marine finfish, mainly salmonids, and shrimp. It alsoraises the age old issue of why should the world endorse a food production systemthat converts what is perceived as low quality protein to high quality protein thatis within the reach of only the rich, thereby depriving the millions of poor who areunable to obtain the basic animal protein needs. This ethical question in the use ofnearly 25% of capture fisheries of low valued fish/trash fish/forage fish for reductionpurposes primarily to produce ingredients for animal feeds including feedingfish (rather than a direct food source for the millions of hungry and poor) willremain in the forefront for a long time to come (Aldhous 2004 ; Powell 2003) .Needless to say, this contention has been further exacerbated by the recent revelationsthat a significant proportion of the above resources are being channelled intononhuman food production (De Silva and Turchini 2008) . Also in terms of ecologicalefficiency questions, it is important to stress that global aquaculture productionis dominated by the culture of organisms that feed lower in the food chain(e.g., bivalves, seaweeds, the great bulk of finfish species), and this trend is likelyto continue well into the foreseeable future. Many of the cases cited earlier in thiscompendium follow this trend (e.g., filter feeding carp culture in cages in Nepal,China rice fish, CBF in Sri Lanka). Whether consumer preferences for suchspecies will continue and indeed increase in the future remains to be seen.Previous efforts in addressing some of the sustainability questions are brieflysummarized in The Bangkok Declaration and Strategy of April 2000. Therein adeclaration was made and a further 17 key strategies were proposed towardattaining sustainable development needs, and corresponding implementationmechanisms(s) were developed. This strategy has sought to address those issuesrelated to Aquaculture Development Beyond (2000) in the new millennium; a processthrough which the above mentioned 17 key elements are now being developedand implemented to varying degrees with varying degrees of success. In summary,significant progress has been made on the sustainability issue, but more needs to bedone. The above thinking has guided much of the present endeavor to documentsuccess stories, and we have sought to summarize this thinking in Box 10.1.