A fresh look at blue foods
Blue food is a new term for an ancient practice: deriving food from aquatic animals, plants or algae that are either caught or cultivated. Right now, the topic of blue foods is red hot. In conjunction with the United Nations Food Systems Summit, a high profile Blue Food Assessment was launched, and during the Summit, 21 governments and partners officially announced a Blue Foods Coalition as part of one of the summit’s transformational solutions. The journal Nature has produced an expansive online feature on blue foods, including an editorial that points out that despite providing nutrition to some 3.2 billion people around the world, blue foods have been overlooked in discussions of global food systems.
That same editorial, however, typifies another bias: a focus on blue foods from marine environments and omission of aquatic foods from the world’s rivers, lakes, and inland wetlands. This, despite the fact that inland (as opposed to coastal/ocean) aquaculture production comprises over 60 percent (by weight) of all aquaculture globally (excluding seaweeds), and 40 percent of global fish consumption depends on rivers.
Overlooked freshwater blue foods
This bias has been codified in global sustainability agendas. For all intents and purposes, inland (or freshwater) blue foods are absent from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), despite contributing to goals and targets involving food security, poverty alleviation, livelihoods, human well-being, and ecosystem function, amongst others. Most glaringly, SDG 14 (‘Life Below Water’) focuses largely on fisheries and aquaculture but in practice only addresses marine resources. A Resolution passed at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress seeks to redress this oversight by urging the IUCN Director General, Commissions, Members and states to support more explicit inclusion of inland fisheries in SDG targets as well as in the forthcoming Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.
Inland blue foods, and especially wild capture fisheries, have been ignored for many of the same reasons given for the under-appreciation of marine blue foods: the predominance of small-scale operations and the lack of empowerment of the fishers and fish farmers behind that harvest. An estimated 90 percent of inland fisheries are small-scale, and the women, men and children who rely on them both for livelihoods and nutrition are frequently impoverished and vulnerable.
These fisheries are notoriously hard to monitor using conventional methods, and the monitoring that does occur is inadequately resourced. As a result, the fisheries are poorly known and undervalued. When development decisions around the food-water-energy nexus are being made — decisions with implications for the health of local and downstream freshwater ecosystems and the aquatic species they support — inland fisheries rarely have a seat at the table. Inland fisheries are perceived as expendable — there is an assumption that they can be replaced with farmed fish or other forms of protein, and that attempts to manage or rehabilitate them are doomed to fail given the challenges inherent in open-access resources and the array of threats impinging on freshwater ecosystems.
Why it matters and what we’re doing
It’s true that freshwater ecosystems are besieged by threats, with freshwater species populations and ecosystems in sharp decline around the world. But there are solutions — a six-part ‘emergency recovery plan’ for reversing the trajectory of freshwater biodiversity loss has been proposed, based on proven approaches. Those approaches include community fisheries management, with demonstrated success in systems from the Amazon to the Mekong. But successful inland fisheries management cannot happen without good governance, sufficient resourcing and capacity, and other enabling conditions — including policies that put inland fisheries stakeholders on an equal footing with other basin stakeholders.
What’s not true is that inland fisheries are replaceable. Recent studies from Peru, Bangladesh, and elsewhere have demonstrated the critical importance of wild caught inland fish species to providing essential micronutrients to communities without ready access to substitutes, noting that fish species diversity underpins this natural buffet. Indeed, wild-caught inland fish are low-input and ‘climate-friendly’ food sources, which if replaced by other animal production systems would generate undesirable greenhouse gas emissions. And while aquaculture can support livelihoods and contribute to food security, there is little evidence that an increase in aquaculture results in a decrease in pressure on wild caught fisheries. As we work to chart a sustainable path for the growth of aquaculture, we must simultaneously acknowledge the essential contribution of wild caught inland fisheries to blue foods, support the effective management of those fisheries, and improve freshwater ecosystem health.
The Inland Fisheries Alliance — a group of conservation, development, and research organizations — has recently formed to catalyze this work. Specifically, the Alliance is focusing on integrating inland fisheries into global development and conservation agendas. Key objectives include:
- The integration of inland fisheries safeguards and priorities into relevant policies and environmental standards of public donors.
- The incorporation of sustainable inland fisheries into global policy instruments.
- The adoption and implementation of Alliance principles by strategic partners in the agriculture, water resources, hydropower, and aquaculture sectors.
Core principles for sustainable inland fisheries
To achieve these and other objectives, the Alliance is starting by defining core principles. The Alliance’s vision is for ‘a world where inland fisheries are resilient, resourced, and equitably governed as part of sustainable food systems and healthy aquatic ecosystems.’ But what does achieving that vision mean in practice? In a nutshell, what makes an inland fishery sustainable?
As with coastal and marine fisheries, issues of equity and governance will be key to sustainable inland fisheries, ensuring that those who rely on and benefit from fisheries can participate in decisions affecting them. Ecosystem conservation is also universally important, but the conservation of freshwater ecosystems must grapple not only with direct threats (like habitat destruction from sand mining) but also with those originating upslope (like agricultural development) and upstream (like hydropower and water supply dams).
Contending with trade-offs is a reality for sustaining inland fisheries, with few freshwater ecosystems spared from the impacts of development. The current spotlight on blue foods presents an opportunity for elevating inland fisheries and their full range of values, so that future development decisions cannot ignore them. Now is the time to underscore that blue foods are critical components of global food systems…and that inland fisheries are critical components of blue foods.
