Sustainable food: Fish farming overtakes beef farming

According to the Earth Policy Institute, the world quietly reached a milestone in the evolution of the human diet in 2011. For the first time in modern history, world farmed fish production topped beef production. The gap widened in 2012, with output from fish farming—also called aquaculture—reaching a record 66 million tons, compared with production of beef at 63 million tons. And 2013 may well be the first year that people eat more fish raised on farms than caught in the wild. More than just a crossing of lines, these trends illustrate the latest stage in a historic shift in food production—a shift that at its core is a story of natural limits.

According to a report of the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, diet is responsible for around 1/4 of the total ecological footprint of individuals. Surprisingly, the transportation of food has a very small impact (1.7%) on the overall footprint. Beef has an ecological footprint of 15.7 gha /1000 kg, while fish is 10.1 (vegetables are 0.4). And farmed fish - of the kind consumed in China (e.g. silver carp), which accounts for 62% of the world's aquaculture - has an even lower ecological footprint and are a relatively sustainable way of fish farming (as opposed to salmon farming, more typically consumed in the West, which relies on wild catches of anchovies to feed the salmon).