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he town of Turners Falls, Massachusetts, use but its pollution, replicating the waste manage-
on the Connecticut River about 150 miles ment practices of local dairy farmers who storehouse
west of Boston, was one of the many small manure. Workers periodically scoop out waste from
New England towns that thrived during the fish tanks and sell it as a nutrient-rich manure to
the Industrial Revolution at the turn of local corn and vegetable farmers.
the twentieth century. The textile factories and pulp A world away, on Phuket Island in southern
mills of that era are long gone, but today the town is Thailand, aquaculture is having a very different
The Promises and Pitfalls of Fish Farming part of another development that could have global
reverberations. This time, it is part of what might
impact. Not far from four-star resort hotels, shrimp-
breeding ponds have blanketed the landscape. In the
someday be called an integrated industrial revolution. village of Ao Goong (meaning Bay of Prawns), the
One of its newer businesses, housed in a corrugated rural quiet has been displaced by a constant drone of
steel building not far from the river, produces fish. generators circulating air into the ponds and pump-
Aquafutures, as the name implies, is not a traditional ing out wastes.
A generation ago, agriculture responded to the New England fishing enterprise of the kind that Unlike their contemporaries in Turners Falls, the
launched its boats from the Massachusetts or Rhode people of Ao Goong have not welcomed this new
challenge of rising population by achieving big Island coast during the country’s early history. business. The wastes from the ponds have been sim-
Through the use of water recirculation technology, ply dumped on the ground, causing the villagers’
increases in crop yields—but at considerable cost the company—one of many in its fast-growing busi- coconut trees to turn brown and their well water to
ness—is helping to radically change the way fish are go bad. They can no longer use the wells, and have
to environmental and social stability. Now, as produced, and ultimately to determine what role had to haul in drinking water from somewhere else.
aquaculture will play in supplying food to the world. When the wastes from the cultivated shrimp were
agricultural productivity flattens while demand Inside this one-acre facility, amidst fish tanks, pro- redirected into the bay, wild shrimp were killed—
continues to rise, high-tech fish farmers are cessing facilities, and support systems, Aquafutures’ destroying the traditional local economy. For genera-
employees raise hybrid striped bass—a cross between tions, the villagers have made their living by fishing
wading into the breach. But can they replicate white and striped bass. Shipped in as fingerlings that shrimp from the sea, but the arrival of commercial
weigh 2 grams, the bass are kept in this secure envi- prawn farmers is putting them out of business.
the successes of the Green Revolution without ronment for about 10 months during which they are As the people of Phuket Island have learned, the
given high-protein feeds. Once they reach market- environmental and social costs of shrimp farming can
repeating and compounding its disasters? size of about 800 grams, they are shipped to restau- be enormous. Shrimp is the most valuable commodi-
rants and supermarkets. While this facility may seem ty being produced by the booming aquaculture indus-
far removed from nature, it is in fact fairly well try, and arguably the most destructive. But it is not
designed to mesh with the resource constraints of alone: a wide range of indiscriminate and poorly
natural systems. planned fish farming operations are leaving their heavy
by Anne Platt McGinn
By using state-of-the-art recirculating technology, footprints—destabilizing coastal ecology, degrading
with computers monitoring temperature, oxygen, farmland, and polluting drinking water supplies.
and chemical levels, the plant can recirculate each The conundrum is that fish-farming, if properly
liter of water 250 times before it is discharged. done, offers great advantages in resource-use effi-
Although the process is energy-intensive, the electri- ciency over both traditional fishing and conventional
cal costs are to some degree offset by the gains in agriculture—advantages the world can ill afford to
water efficiency. High water demand is a major prob- squander in an era of impending food scarcity.
lem for food production worldwide, whether in irri- Indeed, integrated fish and rice farming has formed
gating agricultural land or in providing future habitat the backbone of traditional agriculture in Asia for
ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRIAN BATTLES for fish. Aquafutures has minimized not only its water centuries. As the world’s expanding human popula-