Fish Farming

Farming a single species of fish through industrial aquaculture processes, as opposed to hunting marine life in the wild or integrating fish farming with subsistence agriculture as is done in Asia and Africa, is a relatively new idea. Farming marine species such as Atlantic salmon and cod emerged slowly in the 19th century, prompted initially by localized overfishing, fluctuating fish landings, and increasing demand from merchants. The Atlantic salmon was domesticated for industrial production in Norway after wild salmon [Page 1120]declined due to overfishing and other anthropogenic assaults. After World War II, the technologies of war were applied to finding and catching fish worldwide. Factory freezer bottom draggers, which scrape the ocean's floor collecting everything in their path, drift nets and monofilament gill nets, hydraulic winches, sonar, radar, diesel engines, and other industrial fishing technologies drove 75% of global fisheries to the brink of commercial extinction by the dawn of the 20th century.

In the wake of the decline in global wild fisheries, industrial fish farming has positioned itself as the solution to the global food crisis and overfishing. The resulting “Blue Revolution,” termed so by the industrial aquaculture industry to refer to the domestication and cultivation of aquatic plants and animals for profitable sale in global markets, promises to transform wild marine fish into docile domesticates and fish hunters into harvesters. As commercially fished marine species continue to face extinction in the wild due to overfishing, pollution, global climate change, and a host of other anthropogenic assaults, “culture” has emerged as a keyword in global fisheries. Like the terrestrial dreams and grandiose visions of their Green comrades a half-century earlier, Blue revolutionaries advocate the application of scientific expertise, industrial technology, and transnational capital in their oceanic culturing projects. These culturing projects influence and seek to transform human identity and ways of living as much as they do the genetic makeup, behaviors, and metabolism of the wild fish species that are targeted for industrial domestication and farming.

While marine fisheries have been highly capitalized and industrialized since World War II, it is only since the 1980s that the marine environment has undergone an agricultural transformation such as the one that has been well established on land for many thousands of years.