In response to Greg Mercer’s opinion column regarding aquaculture and the insinuation that it is a potential answer to a food and or fishing deficit, I’m concerned people will get the wrong impression.

Farm fishing on a large scale is not ecologically responsible. That aside, it should never be looked at as a substitute to community-based sustainable wild fisheries. There is no benefit to replacing one shortage with another. Intensive aquaculture requires large amounts of feed pellets and other types of food to produce adult fish. Far more inputs are needed than the end product’s weight. Where does this fish food come from? Most often it comes from other fish that are being caught unsustainably, specifically for the fish-feed market.

I am currently doing a master’s thesis on this specific topic, as the collapse and abandonment of rural fishing communities around the world is having devastating effects on people and their local economies. It is a tragedy that has been ignored for far too long and it needs to be reversed.

Why is this happening? It’s because corn has a vote and fish do not. Governments, especially in North America, have not defended local fishing communities, or the marine habitats that have sustained us for generations. Their focus has been on promoting a large-scale corn monoculture that has been degrading land and water systems due to the vast chemical inputs.

Mercer’s column fuels one of my worst fears and that is a growing attitude in society that there is nothing we can do to save our wild fisheries and that, therefore, fish farming is the answer. The solution is and will always remain using our natural resources responsibly, restoring and enhancing fish habitats, supporting healthy local rural communities which include marine- based ones, and that our insatiable appetite for below-cost protein is, ironically, robbing us of long-term food security.

This race to the bottom approach must end.

Mike Nagy, Rockwood