Healthy Omega Three Fatty Acid and Unhealthy Farmed Salmon
Aquaculture — the commercial raising of fish — was touted as a "blue revolution," a seagoing version of the Green Revolution that vastly multiplied agricultural output in underdeveloped countries.
But just as the Green Revolution sparked concerns about its reliance on pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and a great deal more water, so has the blue revolution provoked a rebellion among scientists and environmentalists who fear that the industry, if left unregulated, could wreak havoc in oceans, estuaries, and human health.
Fish farming dramatically increased because about half the world's wild fisheries have been exhausted by overfishing. Consumer demand for a lean protein with heart-healthy omega three fatty acids is severely depleting wild fish stocks.
In the North Atlantic, one of the most depleted oceans, populations of popular fish (cod, flounder, haddock, hake and tuna) are just one-sixth of what they were a century ago. A European Union panel last week backed calls for a total ban on the fishing of cod in the North Atlantic and a moratorium on the fishing of haddock and whiting there.
But fish farming isn't a solution to meet insatiable consumer demand because floating pens trap a high concentration of fish that are fed industrialized food pellets containing fish proteins, antibiotics, growth hormones, pesticides, as well as other toxic contaminants like mercury, cadmium, and arsenic.
Such intensive production methods have led to pollution and the spread of infectious salmon anemia, a disease that isn't a problem when salmon live in the wild naturally, unconfined by cages, unrestricted to a single spot, not swimming in their own feces, and not fed industrialized, genetically modified grain.
Salmon companies moved to Chile because the fjords were unspoiled, but that is no longer the case as the intensive fish farms have polluted the waters with fish feces as well as making the water oxygen-depleted, which endangers other marine life.
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