| www.PlanetaVerdeMarAzul.org "Green Planet Blue Sea" The Official Website for Maya Neem Farms, Yucatan, Mexico A Model Neem Plantation in Progress for Profitable, Integrated, Sustainable and Ecologically Balanced Rural Development, Renewable Land, Sea and Water Use, and Resource Conservation Think about Tilapia Fish Farming....? |
| Introduction: A "Crisis" is a failure to adapt creatively to everyday challenges and opportunities. The battle to save the Seas and world´s fishing industries is far from over but for many areas on the planet, this way of life is at best challenged if not already run aground. Depletion of fish and seafood stocks due to over fishing and lack of or improper management have put our seas, and the fishing industries that depend on them, on the brink in many areas and Mexico is no exception. Failing populations of local fish combined with dramatically higher costs of production due to the current "Crisis" has already devastated this age old industry and coastal tradition in our area off the Yucatán coast. Oil exploration is on the increase and numerous off-shore drilling platforms are scheduled for placement over the next few years in order to help keep Mexico´s state owned PEMEX oil company a float without selling out to better funded and certainly more aggressive multinational oil companies chomping at the bit to move in and make a literal "killing" by their privatization of Mexico´s still abundant oil resources and reserves. With this additional drilling however, and regardless of whomsoever does it, pollution, in surprisingly wide ranging swaths of the seas, is accepted as inevitable and with the spills and leaks typical of these operations will exclude large areas of current fishing grounds to fishermen based upon the oil and by-products of the oil drilling contaminating the fish they would otherwise be harvesting. To Mexico´s credit, they do test seafood for contaminants however this can only result in further hardship on the fishing industry as more traditional fishing grounds become "off limits" thus also translating into higher prices for end consumers. Besides these additional pressures, the usual, now almost commonly accepted as "normal" contaminants absorbed by sea-caught fish and other delicacies, further down the food chain, will also remain and indeed probably continue to increase over time and in the near term. Mercury, PCB´s and a range of other pollutants, including "so-called, drug resistant, "Super Bacteria" have already made it potentially dangerous for pregnant women to eat fish more than once or twice a month. Never mind prawns, shrimp, scallops, oysters, clams, mussels, and others who not only absorb and store more readily these deadly toxins but whose biology is too simple to process and expel even small amounts that more biologically developed organisms like fish can. Fishing nevertheless remains big business and although it is estimated that worldwide "1,650 businesses in all are responsible for " peddling most of the 147m tonnes of seafood produced globally every year. Of this, 100m tonnes are caught in the wild while the rest is farmed to satisfy an insatiable demand" (My emphasis) Please refer back to these numbers or keep them in mind when we deal with demand and the Tilapia market especially as it relates to the unique situation we are blessed with in the Yucatán. One more comment about demand: "Already, 1.2 billion people depend on fish in their diet - and in Europe we each consume 20kg per year on average, compared to 5kg per person in India. However, as the emergent middle classes in Asia develop a taste, and a budget, for seafood - considered a luxury item until now - demand will rocket further." In the near term, that demand will increase pressure on native ocean stocks and species while also increasing demand and markets for farmed fish. It is no coincidence that many parallels exist between the ever increasing demand for natural, free growing tropical hardwoods and the growth of plantation harvested hardwoods which is increasing at such a dramatic rate that the forests they should ideally be "protecting" by taking commercial pressure off demand to be cut but instead may be contributing to their destruction because industry people are myopically seeing a heftier bottom line in plantation based forests than the one´s nature gave us. Will we never learn that Nature probably had something in mind when it did not populate our forests, jungles, rain forests, fields, valleys, streams, rivers and seas with mono-cultures of plants and animals? This is not the place to go into the importance of "diversity" and how it protects all of our interests, lives, health, and economies, but do please keep that idea in mind as you read through our site. If nothing else, watch how every aspect we will speak of will be inter-dependent upon every other aspect of our activities. The ranch/plantation after all is simply and nothing more than a microcosm of the greater biosphere we all live in. We will do well to learn as much as we can, as fast as we can, about how it all works, how we fit into the total picture, and what impact our activities, economic or otherwise, can have near and long term. Let´s do it for ourselves, first of all. If we do not have or plan to have kids or grand children, let´s do it for someone else´s because, like it or not, they, one day, will be the custodians of all we still have left and are too rapidly destroying. |
| Tilapia in the Yucatán: Sustainable Profit meets Sustainable Ecology To be continued soon. Please see the listed links on our site and below meantime and do feel free to contact us directly! http://www.premierorganicfarms.com/fish.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilapia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture_of_tilapia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oreochromis_niloticus More Google/Wikipedia Tilapia references: http://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia+Tilapia&rls=com.microsoft:*:IE-SearchBox&ie=U TF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GFRD_en Cutting Tilapia Farming Costs Your own Tilapia Operation? |
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