The global demand for seafood is rising rapidly with a growing population consuming larger amounts of fish in their diets. Most of the additional demand for seafood is now met by aquaculture as global catches from wild fisheries have stagnated or decreased since the mid-1980s. 

Can the aquaculture sector avoid some of the large resource and environmental problems that have plagued the agricultural and livestock sectors during the past several decades? 

Aquaculture is now the fastest-growing animal food production sector and will soon supply more than half of the world's seafood. The industry can play a vital role in ensuring access to affordable seafood and in generating income from the sale of seafood in both developed and developing countries.

Although aquaculture has the potential to feed millions of people, some types of aquaculture production may severely degrade aquatic ecosystems, pose health risks to consumers, reduce incomes and employment in the capture fisheries sector, and diminish food resources for poor populations.

A study by FSE director Rosamond L. Naylor and Stanford Ph.D. student Dane Klinger explores potential solutions to the industry's range of resource and environmental problems. These include novel culture systems; alternative feed strategies; and species choices by stage of adoption, benefits, costs and constraints. The study also considers promising technologies and policies that could provide incentives for innovation and environmental improvement.

"Rethinking aquaculture production with an integrated mind-set is needed to tackle the simultaneous challenges of feed and energy demands, containment of wastes, pathogens, and escaped fish, land and water requirements, and consumer preferences," said Klinger. 

Environmental regulations, international standards, labeling, and information strategies can help provide incentives to producers to adopt improved technologies and management practices, but they need to be coordinated and promoted with care to prevent excessive costs to producers and confusion for consumers.

FSE affiliated faculty member Pamela Matson was the keynote speaker at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center at the University of Maine. Her talk focuses on what is needed to transition to a sustainable world. She frames her lecture around FSE's agricultural sustainability research in the Yaqui Valley, Mexico.

Soybean production has become a significant force for economic development in Brazil, but has come at the cost of expansion into non-protected forests in the Amazon and native savanna in the Cerrado. Over the past fifty years, production has increased from 26 million to 260 million tons. Area planted to soybeans has increased from roughly 1 million hectares in 1970 to more than 23 million hectares in 2010, second only to the United States.

A new study out of Stanford University examines the role of institutions and supply chain conditions in Brazil’s booming soybean industry and the relationship between soy yields and planted area. With the demand for soybeans projected to increase far into the future a better understanding of the economic and institutional factors influencing production can help policymakers better manage land use change.

Using county level data the researchers found that soy area and yields are higher in areas with high cooperative membership and credit levels, and where cheap credit sources are more accessible. Cooperatives help producers secure lower prices for inputs or higher prices for outputs through group purchases and sales. They also enable producers to store their grain past the harvesting period and sell it when prices are higher.

“This suggests that soybean production and profitability will increase as supply chain infrastructure improves in the Cerrado and Amazon,” said lead author Rachael Garrett, a PhD student in Stanford’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources.

The authors did not find a significant relationship between land tenure and planted area or land tenure and yields. But found that yields decline and planted area actually increases as transportation costs increase. More importantly, the study showed counties with higher yields have a higher proportion of land planted in soy.

“Policies intending to spare land through technological yield improvements could actually lead to land expansion in the absence of strong land use regulations if demand and per hectare profits are high,” said co-author Rosamond L. Naylor, director of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.

The current Forest Code requires rural land users in the Amazon to conserve 80% of their property in a ‘Legal Reserve’, and landowners in the Cerrado to conserve 20%. Historically, illegal clearings have been common and enforcement of the Legal Reserve requirements remains poor.

While this study focuses on Brazil, the results underscore the importance of understanding how supply chains influence land use associated with cash crops in other countries. Future demand for soybeans, as well as for cash crops like Indonesian palm oil, will continue to grow as demand for cooking oil, livestock feed, and biodiesel increase with income growth and changing dietary preferences in emerging economies. 

With all of the attention paid to global climate change and the disruption of the carbon cycle, biologist and FSE affiliated faculty Peter Vitousek discusses the serious impacts humankind has had on the nitrogen cycle and how that relates to our food system. He expands on the modern food production system as the primary driver of land use change, and explains just what he means when he says he wants to make the world a less homogeneous place with some interesting cultural implications.

Food security expert David Lobell talks with Stanford's Generation Anthropocene about the wide range of problems our changing climate will have on agriculture and the prospects for creating a sustainable food system in the future.

What does drought in Kansas have to do with underutilized groundwater in sub-Saharan Africa? Potentially a lot, according to a new study by researchers with the Global Freshwater Initiative (GFI), a program of the Stanford Woods Institute. The study, co-authored by FSE senior fellow Scott Rozelle, is the first to systematically analyze and classify water crises around the world. It finds that water systems have a limited set of patterns or "syndromes" which can be classified into one of four categories: unsustainability, vulnerability, chronic scarcity or adaptation. These syndromes have their root causes in just a few factors that influence demand, supply, infrastructure and governance - a finding that challenges long-held views that freshwater issues require highly individualized solutions.