Aquaculture and the Bioeconomy in the Arctic Circle

The bioeconomy – an economy based on the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable biological resources - can be critical to planetary health.  However, this is not a given; just because resources are renewable does not mean that they deliver an economy that is sustainable. As TNI has written, the dominant bioeconomy framework put forward by actors such as the EU is still centred largely on the commodification of nature and knowledge in the service of limitless growth, corporate power, and economic competitiveness.

There is a strong need to construct and reclaim alternative visions of the bioeconomy centred on de-intensification, decentralisation, and regeneration through approaches such as agroecology as well as by addressing key questions of governance, power, and agency.

This will be the core objective of FULCRUM: a three year project in which TNI is a partner that will seek to critically examine the contribution of the bioeconomy to sustainable food system transformation across five ‘Living Labs’ that span marine and terrestrial settings in Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Italy.

I was recently able to visit the site of one of the project’s Living Labs in Bodø, a coastal town just North of the Arctic Circle in Norway. Here, bioeconomy efforts centre on the transformation of the waste streams and by-products generated by aquaculture into high-value products such as Omega-3 oils and protein rich seaweed.

Aquaculture involves the farming of seafood like fish, shellfish, and algae. Positioned as a response to the crises of overfishing, it is the fastest growing form of food production in the world today.

In Norway, aquaculture is of national strategic importance: Norway is the world’s largest producer of farmed salmon amounting to an US$ 18 billion dollar industry. On the flight along Norway’s coastline, I could observe the cages of numerous floating fish farms while airport posters produced by aquafeed company, Biomar, proclaimed that “Aquaculture is Norway’s largest renewable export industry”. Not highlighted in the marketing campaign is the enormous levels of pollution linked to the country’s aquaculture industry.

The problems facing the industry are of course not unknown. A core campaign spearheaded by the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP) that TNI is supporting, along with other allies linked to the global Nyéléni food sovereignty movement, calls for an end to intensive, industrial aquaculture due to its negative impact on the environment, animal welfare, and the livelihoods of small-scale fishers. 

 Another approach is that offered by biotechnology. I was able to understand a little of what this looks like through a visit to an aquaculture related testing facility on the outskirts of Bodø operated by NIBIO – the Norwegian Institute for Bioeconomy Research.

During our tour of the facility, an explanation was given of some of the complex bio-chemical processes that are being carried including protein and lipid analysis, gene editing and manipulation, and micro-nutrient, chemical and heavy metals testing, to tackle an array of problems facing the aquaculture industry such as salmon lice and other disease outbreaks amongst farmed fish species such as cod and Atlantic halibut.

 A particular current focus is on an attempt to get an algae industry up and running through kelp farming. Kelp can be used as source of food with high vitamin C content, animal feed, and fertiliser. Norway is particularly well suited to kelp farming given the periods of high light intensity the country experiences during the summer. However, it faces a significant obstacle in form of ‘urchin barrens’ whereby the ‘overgrazing’ of kelp forests by sea urchins has led to their drastic decline.1 A follow-on from the attempt to further commodify algae is thus also to intensify the harvesting of sea urchins and their subsequent transformation (or ‘valorisation’) into other productive uses including as a biostimulant and soil enhancer.

To what extent some of these solutions can offer a way out of the numerous challenges facing the aquaculture industry is something we explored openly with FULCRUM project partners and other invited stakeholders.

FULCRUM’s objectives to contribute to a more just and circular bioeconomy will not be met if bioeconomy strategies only advance biotech industry while leaving more marginalized actors – such as smallholder farmers, fishers, SMEs, women and youth - behind. There is here a potential tension or non-alignment between ‘circularity’ and ‘justice’ if circularity is narrowly understood as technical efficiency gains and the reduction of waste and material footprints without also a redistribution in power relations and governance.

This is unlikely to happen if discussions take place within current system boundaries where the entry point is heavily slanted to high-tech, capital intensive ‘solutions’ to environmental crises. Grappling with these challenges and contradictions will drive the work of the FULCRUM project over the next three years as alternative visions of the bioeconomy compete with each. Reclaiming an alternative vision of the bioeconomy rooted in principles of social and environmental justice will be at the heart of this challenge.