Countries can help address malnutrition and food insecurity by expanding their production of blue foods—including fish, seafood, and seaweed—but should do so in a sustainable way, according to experts.
“For a long period of time, fisheries were just a contribution to GDP [gross domestic product], and now there’s a shift in thinking towards how fisheries contribute to human health and nutrition,” said Laura Elsler, research associate in Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Nutrition, one of the experts quoted in a June 13 Courthouse News Service article.
Elsler explained that compared to meat from land animals, aquatic species contain similar protein levels but provide higher amounts of important micronutrients including vitamins, omega-3 fatty acids, and zinc and iron. She also said that when international trade systems cannot supply enough food—which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic—cultivating blue foods on a local level can protect against food insecurity.
However, blue food production can harm the environment through overfishing, water pollution, and habitat destruction. Elsler said that countries should work together in order to pass effective legislation to support sustainable practices. “Fish don’t respect the borders that we tend to draw over our oceans. So you will always have to have a lot of collaboration, and we’re seeing that from the local scale all the way up to the international scale,” she said.
Read the Courthouse News Service article: Blue foods provide healthy haul to combat hunger — but scaling up could prove tricky
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