Global partnership in aquaculture helps meet demand
Over 50 countries
endorsed the Global Aquaculture Advancement Partnership (GAAP)
programme, which will bring together governments, UN agencies,
non-governmental organisations and the private sector to find
sustainable solutions to meeting the need for fish products.
Aquaculture already supplies nearly 50 percent – or nearly 63 million
tonnes – of fish consumed globally, and with production from wild fish
stocks levelling off, it will fall to fish farmers to supply the
estimated additional 50 million tonnes required to feed the rising world
population by 2030.
But while aquaculture is one of
the fastest expanding food sectors in the world with a current growth
rate of around 6.1 percent a year, recent trends predict a gradual
decline which might see the sector fall short of bridging the gap
between projected supply and demand.
“This is an
alarming situation and urgent concerted efforts to build a strong
private-public partnership are imperative to maintain the current rate
of growth of aquaculture over the coming years,” said Árni M. Mathiesen,
FAO Assistant Director General for Fisheries and Aquaculture.
The partnership will be tasked with overcoming obstacles to the
expansion of the sector, which include the increasing scarcity of land
and water for the development of inland fisheries and the need to step
up aquaculture activities in the world’s seas and oceans.
This in turn will require strict governance to safeguard aquatic animal health and conserve biodiversity.
“GAAP will also help tap the huge potential of aquaculture to help
reduce poverty, unemployment and socio-economic inequalities through
proper planning and development,” Mathiesen said.
Some 55 million people are directly employed by the fisheries and aquaculture sector, of whom 85 percent live in Asia.
The initiative will now go for approval to the Committee on Fisheries
when it meets at FAO headquarters in Rome in June 2014.
A tool to help countries assess whether public and private aquaculture
certification schemes are in line with FAO’s global guidelines for
certification has also received a nod from the sub-committee, which is
the only global intergovernmental forum discussing aquaculture
development.
Covering animal health, food safety,
the environment and worker welfare issues, the FAO aquaculture
guidelines were approved in 2011 after four years of consultation among
governments, producers, processors and traders.
“It
is overwhelmingly positive that consumers want to see a label on a
product showing that it is sustainably produced. The challenge is to
ensure certification provides adequate incentives to small producers and
eventually contributes to overall sustainability of the sector,” said
FAO Senior Aquaculture Officer Rohana Subasinghe.
“Many schemes claim they are within the FAO guidelines, but this new
evaluation framework will allow them to self-assess whether that’s
true,” he said.
The evaluation framework will also now pass to the Committee on Fisheries for approval in June next year.-VNA