Aquaculture, or the controlled rearing of fish and aquatic animals, is the fastest growing food-system sub-sector on earth. Its proponents argue that, if developed properly, industrial aquaculture can ameliorate a host of socio-ecological problems across world food systems. Aquaculture—an ancient practice—now appears as an ultra-modern component of the world food system. For example, in 2013, farmed salmon (AquAdvantage) became the first genetically modified animal deemed fit for human consumption by the U.S. Food and Drug and Administration.
Conversely, capture fishery development has flatlined and appears materially constrained by the finite nature of wild, marine ecosystems. Put differently, the infinite growth approach to wild capture fisheries has reached its limits. Because of these trends, many reason that ‘blue foods,’ or aquatic and marine based food systems, should utilize aquaculture in order to compensate for stagnant wild fisheries and the limited ability of ecologically intensive, terrestrial livestock to feed a growing population in sustainable fashion.
While technological innovation is paramount, environmental sociological scholarship on marine food systems and development usually stresses that hunger and unsustainable environmental impacts are political problems exacerbated by rigid and complex social structures. The capacity of aquaculture to ameliorate problems therefore requires careful consideration. What lessons does environmental sociology offer to understand aquaculture’s potential to address these issues, in sustainable fashion?
To start, environmental sociologists have stressed that society and economic production are fundamentally based in a material conditions, whose stability and reproduction are shaped by the requirements of ecosystems. Yet, the norms that govern how we extract resources from ecosystems are socially determined.
For example, in discussing the onset of genetically modified salmon and salmon aquaculture, Clausen, Longo, and Clark (2015) introduce the concept of ‘biological speedup.’ Under an economic system governed by the laws of the capitalist world market, goods must be produced, distributed, and sold at an ever-increasing rate in order to justify continued investment. Think of Adam Smith’s pin factory, where labor was increasingly specialized, or Ford’s usage of hierarchical, increasingly mechanized factory lines. These systems did not arise simply because a growing population needed more cars or cotton shirts. Rather, market competition compelled industrial capitalists to increase the speed and efficiency of production, distribution, and consumption of new materials and commodities.
In thinking about aquatic food systems, the logic is similar. Aquaculture erases many of the obstacles to profit-making that wild, capture fisheries cannot overcome. Aquaculture offers a more controlled environment where aquatic species can be birthed, raised, and harvested in standardized fashion. Each of these components are further divided and reduced, sometimes down to the genome, allowing for an intensification or ‘speed-up’ of certain biological functions. Metabolic processes like maturation and reproduction that were once left to the uncontrollable, fickle features of ocean ecologies become easier to manage under an aquaculture-based aquatic food system.
In addition, industrial aquaculture also necessitates a great deal of inputs, and this requires industrialization elsewhere ‘upstream’ from the point of aquaculture production. Environmental sociologists have dubbed this ‘ecologically intensive aquaculture,’ whereby the rearing of certain fish species requires tremendous energetic and caloric inputs. These methods require aquaculture to extend its commodity chains ‘backward,’ in order to create links with industrial scale suppliers of inputs like soy or fish-based feeds, antibiotics, pesticides, etc.
Industrial aquaculture thus fosters new ‘global commodity chains,’ an analogy originally advanced by economic and developmental sociologists Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein and, a bit later, Gary Gereffi and Jennifer Bair. The concept attempts to capture the complex, interconnected, and mutually dependent nature of the global economy. Sociologists describe global commodity chains as dependent upon contracted and temporary work at labor intensive production points, often sourced in the global South (e.g., Clark and Longo 2022; Suwandi 2019).
Generally speaking, the further ‘upstream,’ or backward in the chain, one goes, competition increases. This tendency shifts price competition away from buyers (e.g., big retail and restaurant firms) and towards the producers of various commodities, who are then pressured to reduce labor costs in order to remain viable in an increasingly crowded global market. In aquaculture supply chains, this pressure can serve as a force that drives severe labor exploitation for low-value ‘trash-fish,’ a process that risks undercutting marine food webs as well.
Many have commented on the myriad environmental problems associated with the usage of processed fish inputs for growing other fish. To avoid the paradox of intensive fishing to support fish-farming, many advocate for transitions to vegetarian feed-inputs, like soy. However, as sociologist Amalia Leguizamón notes in her recent book Seeds of Power, the development of large-scale soy monoculture comes with negative socioecological consequences for rural peasants including land displacement, agri-food system monopolization, local food insecurity, and employment and migration crises.
Thus, industrial scale aquaculture development is embedded within a broader and vastly complex global food system. An environmental sociological framework encourages us to place industrial aquaculture within this context. In doing so, we see how a ‘grow or die’ mentality across a complex web of commodity chains can exacerbate social inequities and injustices.
This sort of analysis differs strongly from ‘demand-side’ framing. Essentially, demand-side framing reasons that food production industrializes out of necessity to feed a growing population. From this point of view, doubling-down on large-scale industrial aquaculture appears as natural solution to avoid hunger and food insecurity. Yet roughly 1 out of every 4 people on earth experiences moderate to severe levels of food insecurity—a number that has, disturbingly, increased in recent years in spite of high levels of food production on land and at sea. Such trends persist in lock step with a food system that is repeatedly criticized for working against, rather than with, the bounds of ecological systems. Maldistribution, over-production, scarcity, and ecological disruption appear historically intertwined.
Why are these problems so persistent? In my view, part of the answer lies in how we tend to think of production in limited terms. Production too often appears to us as chiefly a technical problem—how can we make aquatic food systems more productive and efficient, to limit environmental impacts while still meeting the needs of contemporary society? Once the technical difficulties are solved, we can then sort out the political questions related to distribution, management, equitable trade, etc.
Conversely, environmental sociologists stress that production sites themselves are political nodes, mediated by complex social relationships between fishers and captains, captains and vessel owners, vessel owners and buyers, or even exporters and importers. Through this lens, we might ask what our food systems would look like if we prioritized political and economic justice at site(s) of production. From there, what kinds of technologies would be locally appropriate to utilize at various scales? How do we reckon what is locally and regionally appropriate to global demand, understanding that food is a human right? Simply asking these questions will not lead to food and environmental justice overnight, but I believe they point to the reality that the food system is a social system, not just a technical system in need of better regulation.
References
Clark, Timothy. and Longo, Stefano.B., 2022. Global labor value chains, commodification, and the socioecological structure of severe exploitation. A case study of the Thai seafood sector. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 49(3), pp.652-676.
Leguizamón, Amalia. 2020. Seeds of power: Environmental injustice and genetically modified soybeans in Argentina. Duke University Press.
Longo, Stefano B., Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark. 2015. The tragedy of the commodity: Oceans, fisheries, and aquaculture. Rutgers University Press.
Suwandi, Intan. 2019. Value chains: the new economic imperialism. Monthly Review Press.