Article published in the magazine "Rumos - Economia e desenvolvimento para os novos tempos" (Routes - Economy and development for the new times), of interest for those who preserve nature, work with aquaculture and to the population in general.
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“Fish in the Net
Instead of advocating an absurd moratorium on the biofuel, the green freaks would make better in considering an immediate brake to the expansion of extensive cattle in the Brazilian Rain Forest, great culprit of the forest destruction. As the professor Joan Martinez Alier said in the “Ecologismo dos Pobres” (Publishing company Context, São Paulo, 2007): “100 tons of biomass for hectare are substituted by one cow for hectare.”
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of United (FAO), 70% of the deforested areas of Amazônia had been transformed into pastures, being that the cattle uses currently 30% of all land surface, including permanent pastures and one third of arable lands to produce rations.
The abundance of cheap lands conjugated with improved technology projected Brazil for world’s first place as exporting of bovine meat, producing few arrobas of meat for hectare and almost no direct jobs. In the long run, the cattle conversion of the extensive culture imposes, with good perspectives for its integration with the green energy. At the same time, it is good to think about other ways of animal protein production with a well inferior ecological footprint compared to cattle, that demands great grass or agricultural ground to produce ration. The ox is not a good converter of vegetal protein in meat.
Fish in the net - a new and well-succeeded restaurant in Brasilia D.C. - serves for a very reasonable price flavorful plates elaborated with Nile Tilapia. The fish comes from a fish farm installed in the outskirts of the capital, that produces seven tons of fish per year for each hectare of water blade. Seven tons of fish against some arrobas of ox for hectare!
China is far the champion in the fish production, about 70% of the world-wide production, and counts on a millenarian tradition: some carp species living in different niches inside of the dam, horticulture in the levees, leaf leftovers serving of ration to the fish, ducks created to season the dam and to eliminate the insects that proliferate. A practically sustainable system of production of different types of food!
Brazil enjoys great conditions to become one of the leader countries in the “Blue Revolution” that is only starting; traditional fishes are a hunting system not creation. Brazil’s extensive Atlantic coast, the Amazônia with its water endowment, Pantanal and the numerous lakes of dam give well to pump aquaculture, regarding to preserve water quality and not to repeat the same errors committed in some countries of Asia and Latin America destroying the salt marshes for implanting shrimp farms, with catastrophic social and ambient consequences.
It’s worth to mention here a project of Oldebrecht Foundation in the low South of Bahia state, with the objective to integrally cultivate Nile Tilapias in tank-net serving them a composed ration of banana tree and cassava leaves, vegetal residues that do not demand a handspan of cultivating land. This would be the ideal solution: great amounts of animal protein produced with a modest ecological footprint, in contrast with the cattle extensive production. So far the Nile Tilapia had not accepted well this feeding, but the correct idea to use residues of agricultural production as food for the fish culture is what really matters in this episode.
Without going to the extremity and eliminate barbecue of our menu’s, it is worth to encourage fish consumption, recommended for health reasons and ambient arguments. “
Ignacy Sachs
Regarding the Amazônia, there is a site in favor of Forest preservation. Collaborate!
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To read this story in Portuguese language, click here!
