The Sustainability Conundrum of Fishmeal Substitution by Plant Ingredients in Shrimp Feeds
By W. Malcorps, B. Kok, Mike van‘t Land, M. Fritz, D. van Doren, Kurt Servin, Paul van der Heijden, R. Palmer, N. Auchterlonie, M. Rietkerk and 2 more. Sustainability, 2019
130 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Aquaculture is central in meeting expanding global demands for shrimp consumption. Consequently, increasing feed use is mainly responsible for the overall environmental impact of aquaculture production. Significant amounts of fishmeal are included in shrimp diets, causing dependency on finite marine resources. Driven by economic incentives, terrestrial plant ingredients are widely viewed as sustainable alternatives. Incremental fishmeal substitution by plant ingredients in shrimp feed was modeled and effects on marine and terrestrial resources such as fish, land, freshwater, nitrogen, and phosphorus were assessed. We find that complete substitution of 20–30% fishmeal totals could lead to increasing demand for freshwater (up to 63%), land (up to 81%), and phosphorus (up to 83%), while other substitution rates lead to proportionally lower impacts. These findings suggest additional pressures on essential agricultural resources with associated socio-economic and environmental effects as a trade-off to pressures on finite marine resources. Even though the production of shrimp feed (or aquafeed in general) utilizes only a small percentage of the global crop production, the findings indicate that the sustainability of substituting fishmeal by plant ingredients should not be taken for granted, especially since aquaculture has been one of the fastest growing food sectors. Therefore, the importance of utilizing by-products and novel ingredients such as microbial biomass, algae, and insect meals in mitigating the use of marine and terrestrial resources is discussed.
Subfields: Aquatic Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0f4df64c8619b2875d7a9aabfb031ef60a1551b
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In Aquatic Science
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- A feed is still only as good as its ingredients: An update on the nutritional research strategies for the optimal evaluation of ingredients for aquaculture feeds (2020, background): “Various strategies have been examined to define sustainability of ingredients, but life cycle assessment is perhaps the approach gaining most favour (Boissy et al., 2011; Malcorps et al., 2019; Silva, Valente, Matos, Brandão, & Neto, 2018).”