The ongoing disputes in the South China Sea are usually portrayed as being centered on China’s brazen attempts to claim artificial islands and the waters surrounding them as extensions of its sovereign territory; rights to the 11 billion estimated barrels of oil beneath the sea; or access to the $5.3 trillion trade that passes through it.

n 1997, large commercial fishing boats based in the coastal town of Beaufort, North Carolina began shifting about 13 miles northward per year. By the end of 2014, they were harvesting off the coast of New Jersey.

The Food and Drug Administration lifted an import restriction that allowed AquaBounty, a biotech company with facilities in Canada and Panama, to start raising genetically engineered (GMO) salmon eggs in America, effectively clearing the way for the country’s first GMO seafood—and first commercially raised GMO animal—to come to market

Almost a quarter of the world’s population has anemia. Iron deficiency is a condition affecting over a billion people and it can have serious consequences.

The global fishing fleet has more than doubled from about 1.7 million boats harvesting fish in 1950 to 3.7 million fishing vessels in 2015.
More fishing vessels have become motorized as well: while only 20 percent of the world’s fishing vessels were powered by motors in 1950, this number rose to 68 percent in 2015.

How close are we to a future in which when we think of meat, we think of cell biology and tissue engineering instead of animals? Last week at MIT, 300 entrepreneurs, biologists, engineers, communicators, and students gathered for New Harvest 2019, to explore that question.

Scientists have now quantified the global decline of big freshwater animals: From 1970 to 2012, global populations of freshwater megafauna declined by 88% - twice the loss of vertebrate populations on land or in the ocean. Large fish species are particularly affected.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s aquaculture production, estimated at 1.7 million metric tons (MT) of the global 76.6 million MT of production in 2015, continues to face fish feed shortages.

The South Africa aquaculture sector’s contribution to the economy is considered minor, but the overall growth of fish farming in the country has been described by its Department of Agriculture as “fast-developing,” raising the expectations of increased demand for aquafeed and associated ingredients, particularly corn, fishmeal, soybeans, fish oil and even wheat.

Plenty of fish suffer from water pollution, which takes a toll on their health and reproductive abilities. Yet there is another often-overlooked form of manmade pollution that also affects them: noise pollution.

As with many other aspects of government policy, overfishing and other fishing-related environmental issues are a real problem, but it’s not clear that government intervention is the solution.