This is the second in a five-part editorial series (under the “Environmental Riposte” tag) commenting on Kevin Liblin’s recent series for the National Post (and syndicated in the Vancouver Sun). This second entry is in response to Feed the world: grow fish in Alberta’s badlands.

Since 2001, explains Dr. Savidov, lead plant physiologist and biochemist at this provincial crop diversification lab, he’s recycled the same water, over and over, through jumbo vats, throbbing with hundreds of tilapia fish, out to an adjacent water table as big as a small backyard, where grids of aquaponic crops nourish on nutrients from the composted fish waste, and then back to the fish, where it returns clean and oxygenated.

[snip]

While Western environmentalists lionize unrefined, organic farms, one of the best ways to protect our environment is by spreading 21st century farming technology and corporate agricultural products. Food production that truly sustains the planet is the very stuff that the eco-priests decry: fish farms, genetically modified foods, and farms relying more, not less, on corporate-made chemicals.

That fish-land system in the first paragraph seems pretty organic. I’m not incredulous towards natural fertilizers and controlled water tables — I’m incredulous towards inefficient, chemical nitrogen delivery systems in the Mississippi watershed that lead to giant dead-zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

The late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that modernized farming, ending frequent famines, in India and Asia, illustrated it this way: in 1990, America produced 596 million tons of crops. Had it stuck with 1960 methods of farming, it would have needed 460 million more acres than in 1960, of fertile land. Only, there wasn’t 460 million more acres of good-quality land, so it would have been millions more yet, of poorer quality land.

But what if we tried 21st century organic farms like the one described in the quoted paragraph above? Why is the discussion limited to organic technologies from the 60s?

An hour or so up the road from Dr. Savidov’s laboratories, John Tremblay, president of Alternative Agriculture Technology, breeds shrimp in two huge tanks in a barn in the middle of cattle country. He’s just getting started. When he’s fully scaled up, he estimates an enclosed shrimp farm on an acre of land will produce 60,000 lbs of food yearly — a 30 times greater yield than a typical acre of soybeans. “We went from being labelled shrimp farmers to being sustainable food production specialists,” Mr. Tremblay says. “If a guy can grow shrimp in Alberta then we can do it almost anywhere.”

[snip]

While wild fishing declines, aquaculture is flourishing; accounting now for 42% of seafood production, it is expected to exceed 50% in the next decade, according to the Worldwatch Institute. But environmental groups are arguably the biggest political obstacles to its expansion, pressuring governments and consumers to resist it by claiming that fish farms are unhealthy or contaminate wild species. No such risks have ever been substantiated, Mr. Moore notes. What’s astonishing, he says, is that organizations claiming to care about ocean life are, essentially, pushing to keep us straining sea life, hunting fish, like buffalo, to near extinction, rather than sustainably growing our own.

Groups complaining about fish farms, to my knowledge, aren’t complaining about land-tank based systems as Kevin implies with this line of reasoning. The problematic fish farms, as I understand the issue, are open-net farms in the ocean which generate considerable environmental and epidemiological externalities. The Friends of Clayoquot Sound, for example, aren’t against fish farms but rather want closed-tank over open-net operations.

“Fifteen years after the first genetically-modified food has been commercialized and eaten in the United States, there isn’t a single person that has been sick. There is not a single person that has died. There’s been no environmental catastrophes,” Mr. Pinstrup-Andersen says.

I had coffee with a nutritionist recently. One of the reasons people are removing wheat from their diets in favor of spelt and Canadian Red Wheat is that the monoculture we’re currently producing is undigestible for a surprising number of adults. It’s been engineered for grain size, pest and disease resistance, growth speed, etc., but not nutrition. People are getting sick.

Claiming that there haven’t been any environmental catastrophes is just wrong — it’s a belief predicated on the idea that we’re not currently in the middle of an environment catastrophe (again, like hypoxic dead zones).