For decades radical anti-seafood activists have railed against fishing and aquaculture with abandon. Their well-heeled funders rarely, if ever questioning their long-term goals or even the validity of some of their most exaggerated claims. Groups so quick to wrap themselves in the safety of science routinely ignored it or intentionally failed to ask questions they didn’t want answers too. They’ve ranked retail stores, black balled restaurants and mercilessly attacked an industry that 3 billion people rely on for their primary protein source.
Now comes a new study titled Biodiversity Consequences of Replacing Animal Protein From Capture Fisheries With Animal Protein From Agriculture. As it turns out, replacing all animal protein from marine fisheries with agriculture that supports livestock and poultry would require an area “larger than the extent of intact rain forest in Brazil.” And if you’d like to get rid of aquaculture too you’d need farms that would take up the land mass of a medium-sized European Country. Say, slightly bigger than Switzerland or the Netherlands.
So, activists who have failed to consider how we feed a growing planet while they’ve enthusiastically raised funds with an anti-seafood message should be gassing up their chainsaws. It would appear it’s time to get cutting… or at least it’s time to be careful what you wish for.
