The great seafood shuffle

I'd been vaguely aware of the absurd distances seafood can travel after it has been caught, but this New York Times piece by Paul Greenberg laid out some of the details. In so doing, it also laid bare the insanity of the way we eat nowadays, at least in the U.S.

First, the statistic you should know but which our current eating habits suggest not enough of us do know:

While a majority of the seafood Americans eat is foreign, a third of what Americans catch is sold to foreigners.

What is the consequence of this imbalance?

... when trade so completely severs us from our coastal ecosystems, what motivation have we to preserve them? I’d argue that with so much farmed salmon coming into the country, we turn a blind eye to projects like the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, which would process 10 billion tons of ore from a site next to the spawning grounds of the largest wild sockeye salmon run on earth.

I’d maintain that farmed shrimp inure us to the fact that the principal rearing ground of Gulf shrimp, the Mississippi River Delta, is slipping into the sea at a rate of a football field an hour. I’d venture that if we didn’t import so much farmed seafood we might develop a viable, sustainable aquaculture sector of our own. Currently the United States languishes in 15th place in aquaculture, behind microscopic economies like Egypt and Myanmar. And I’d suggest that all this fish swapping contributes to an often fraudulent seafood marketplace, where nearly half of the oceanic products sold may be mislabeled.

Why does this strange global trade in seafood exist, a trade that at first blush seems terribly wasteful in fuel and time (nothing goes bad faster than seafood)? It seems that it costs less to send the raw product overseas to have it processed, then shipped back to us. Yes: it costs less to ship tons of fish to Asia for cleaning, gutting, carving into filets or pulverizing into fish sticks, and then to ship much of that back to the U.S., than it would cost to process the fish domestically. Even counting the fuel and labor costs, our big domestic seafood companies make a bigger profit this way than they could by not shipping the fish. And this doesn't include the farmed seafood originally raised in Asia. (Nearly all of our shrimp comes from Asia, for instance.)

There are a couple of other big-picture points to make, however, that Greenberg ignores (though he may cover them in the book from which this essay was adapted).

First, the reason the costs make sense for big seafood companies is, their business models don't take into account externalities: the pollution caused by the production and consumption of fuel, the side effects of transporting invasive species in bilge water over tens of thousands of miles (U.S. waterways are being choked by various mollusks and our native species are being decimated by non-native species with no natural predators outcompeting them for food), the environmental and health hazards created by irresponsible aquaculture practices (overuse of antibiotics is one well-known problem; also, in the article's comments, see the one from "Scott L" of "PacNW" referencing the Bloomberg News story about a tilapia farm feeding its fish a substance too disgusting for me to mention), and so on. The free market has never had to account for the totality of its effects on our ecosystem: the global seafood trade is just one more example of our shortsightedness.

Second, while there's no doubt we in the U.S. consume more of the planet's natural resources per capita than anyone else, the frenzied growth of the seafood industry worldwide is not just a result of our ravenous maw. Asia, in particular, loves seafood, and many of its inhabitants lust after a U.S.-style standard of living. We're experiencing a crisis in sustainability already. What will the future hold as living standards worldwide rise and the population grows? If we want to avoid famine and war, we must reduce the planetary population. Period.

Right now Homo Sapiens is a cancerous species, reproducing wildly beyond the ability of the ecosystem to support our numbers. We tend not to notice because the developed world is able to pay to maintain its food and water supplies and the developing world accepts levels and types of malnutrition, disease, injury and death that would never be tolerated by developed nations. The status quo, however, is unsustainable, and you who disdain Malthus can go jump in a polluted lake. Cancer cells eventually kill the host, after which they die off, too. That's where we're headed if we don't confront our destructive industrial practices head-on. The costs will be high; livelihoods will be upended; our standard of living will likely take a hit. But we don't have a choice — not if we want a future as a species.

"The New Geopolitics of Food," Lester Brown

Those who have been paying attention saw this coming thirty or forty years ago, but if you haven't, well, this article on how food scarcity underlies the current unrest in the Middle East, and promises only to get worse in the future, shows that we're teetering on the brink of some extremely unpleasant times.

This is not merely a story about the booming demand for food. Everything from falling water tables to eroding soils and the consequences of global warming means that the world's food supply is unlikely to keep up with our collectively growing appetites.

Between purchases by richer nations of land in poorer nations for growing crops, which takes us right back to the good old days of nineteenth century imperialism, and protective restrictions on exports from grain-rich countries, we're looking at the global economy trying to solve an acute crisis -- hunger -- with Adam Smith's invisible hand. What no one wants to say is that a lot of people in poorer countries will starve if that hand is allowed to sweep through unimpeded.

Not that the land purchases, in particular, have gone unimpeded. Unfortunately, that just means more people in the richer country are at risk of malnutrition or poverty or both. That's better than large numbers of people in the poorer country dying, but not tremendously better.

Or, of course, the countries could go to war. I'm not venturing an opinion as to how that stacks up against mass starvation.

Like it or not, the human race is way overdue for a reality check on its lack of population controls.

Last June I wrote about how overpopulation warnings have had a history of not coming true, making a lot of people sanguine that human ingenuity would always fend it off. But do you know what the price of gleefully outrunning the natural limits on population is? You have no margin for error. If, while outrunning those limits, you stumble, you will fall -- hard. And that means a lot of people will suffer and die.

If we don't learn to restrain ourselves as a species, Nature will take care of overpopulation in its own brutal and unforgiving way.

(I found the article courtesy of LongReads. I'd offer my thanks, but I have to admit I don't feel particularly happy now that I've read it.)

Overpopulation

An International Herald Tribune article describes the destruction of rain forests throughout Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia, due in part to the increased demand for palm oil for biofuel.

This is a tragicomic situation. The movement toward biofuels in the European Union has the best motivation: the desire to increase the fraction of its transportation fuel that comes from renewable sources. Unfortunately, to meet the growing demand for palm oil (which is also desirable in cosmetics and for shelf-stable processed foods), suppliers must grow more oil palm trees. They find the land to do so by clearing rain forests. Rain forests worldwide play a large role in recapturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequestering methane from decaying biomatter.

Deciding between a renewable fuel supply and a vital component of the world's ecosystem is a terrible dilemma.

We are at the point, if we haven't already passed it, of running up against hard limits on our ever-expanding population.

The subject of overpopulation has a long and, to its critics, dubious history, starting in the 18th century with Thomas Malthus. Humanity seems to blow right past the supposed upper limits for a supportable population every time someone declares such a limit to exist, making Malthus and these other prophets of doom sound foolishly alarmist.

Nevertheless, I think the palm-oil dilemma is a sign that today's large human population is going to have more negative than positive consequences in the not too distant future.

Any species' population is as great as its food supply, predators, and diseases allow. Humans in societies don't have any predators of consequence, so our population has been limited only by the availability of food and the incidence of disease. Technology has allowed us to produce more food and to resist more diseases, to the point where today, there are a previously unimaginable six billion of us alive.

However, the scale and effect of human activities has been multiplied by technology, too. We in the United States think nothing of traveling thirty miles to shop at a particularly desirable store, for instance. Yet to do so requires burning gasoline or other fuel (unless you use a bicycle), which results in the release of carbon dioxide and other combustion byproducts. The release of those byproducts has consequences we never thought about until some forty years ago. We had to think about them because we suddenly realized that the output of one car was trivial, but the output of millions was significant. (The same principle applies if you take a bus or a train, of course.)

The complexity of our civilization practically guarantees we're never going to have a perfect understanding of the impact of our activities. Our knowledge will increase with time, of course, but so will the complexity. So how should we try to minimize the likelihood of really large-scale problems caused by the irreconcilable demands of our civilization, like the tug of war between the desire for more palm oil and the desire for breathable air and a not unduly hot environment?

How about reducing the size of that civilization, by reducing the number of ... us?

A couple of formidable objections come to mind. One is that attempts to control population growth have been regarded as dictatorial, and the idea is highly unpopular. The other objection is that in a world of contending nation-states, nations with smaller populations tend to be conquered by nations with larger populations unless the smaller nation has a significant strategic advantage.

I don't have answers to these objections. I wouldn't want to be subject to the simple but draconian population controls imposed by the People's Republic of China, even though they seem to have been successful by some measures. And North Korea's success in preserving the stalemate on the Korean Peninsula demonstrates the continuing value of threatening to unleash human waves in battle (if they're backed by a sufficiently technologically sophisticated army, anyway).

Yet I also don't think we can sustain a world of six billion people, even if not all of them aspire to lead as resource-hungry a lifestyle as those of us in the U.S.

[EDIT: spelling fix: "availabilty" --> availability]