Unsustainable marine macro farms: animal cruelty and serious environmental consequences

Las untenable marinas of macrogranjas: animal abuse and serious impact on the environment. Greenpeace traveled along the coasts from Almería to Alicante with its sailboat ‘Witness’ to document the reality of the disaster. unsustainable marine macro farms and take water samples. Sea bass, sea bream and tuna are among the most important aquaculture species in Spain and are victims of this animal abuse. Four tons of fish are needed to produce one ton of food.. The paralysis of industrial aquaculture is urgently needed, the creation of more marine reserves and for Spain to ratify it Global Ocean Treaty.

For the first time, the environmental organization reveals several unpublished images marinas of macrogranjas Spanish – Roquetas de Mar (Almería), Guardamar del Segura (Alicante), Campello (Alicante) and Villaricos (Almería) – around the animal abuse and the damage they cause to marine ecosystems. The environmental organization has checked the condition of overcrowding and stress to which fish are subjected in the confinement cagessome of which in a deplorable state of conservation and dirtwith cloudy water and dead specimens at the bottom of the nets.

In this research, the first carried out by the Witness sailboat of the environmental organization in Spain, several farms for fattening sea bass and sea bream on the Levantine coast have been documented and samples taken of water, which will now be analyzed in the laboratory. You can’t see it from the surface, but there is a horror of animal exploitation under the Spanish coast.

Industrial aquaculture in Spain is not a sustainable activity, because it has a large number of establishments of carnivorous species. The environmental organization points out that there is no point in producing or fattening these types of species: To feed them, fish stocks must be harvested for the production of fishmeal and agricultural products, which in many cases result from deforestation.. Sea bream, sea bass, turbot and bluefin tuna are produced in Spain. In the latter case this must be taken into account It takes 20 kg of fish to gain 1 kg and that it is a luxury product, more than 85% of which is exported, mainly to Japan. For the rest of the species, they are fattened with fishmeal, that is, processed food. To make one ton of fishmeal, about four to five tons of small pelagic fish are needed.. In the period 2011-2021, sea bass production in Spain amounted to almost 200,000 tons and in the case of sea bream almost 140,000 tons.

“They are trying to convince us that aquaculture is the solution to overfishing, and that is not realistic: the Marine macro farms are contributing to the collapse of fish stocks. The bream and sea bass in the portion are not natural. We must change the production model and protect small-scale artisanal fishing as a sustainable production model for biodiversity and our health,” said Marta Martín-Borregón, head of the environmental organization’s Oceans campaign.

At least Globally, 35% of fish stocks are overfished, and in the case of the Mediterranean this figure rises to 90%. The environmental organization denounces that industrial fishing is harmful and has serious consequences for the oceans by destroying the seabed, incidentally catching protected species and having a high discard rate. The oceans are subject to numerous consequences that bring them to the brink of collapse, such as overfishing, pollution, climate change, industrial activities or loss of biodiversity..

“Urgent action is needed in light of the dire consequences of climate change marinas of macrogranjas in Spain and to prevent the start of new aquaculture farms, such as the bluefin tuna farms in Getaria and Castellón or the octopus farm in the Canary Islands,” Martín-Borregón adds: “Similarly We demand that the government implement Article 17 of the Common Fisheries Policy, that is to say, fishing opportunities (quota and fishing effort) are distributed for the benefit of low-impact fisheries and local communities, taking into account social and environmental criteria such as the number of employees or the injection into the local economy , allowing selectivity, or reducing the impact on the fund, following scientific recommendations to end the overfishing. To secure the future of our oceans and fish stocks, we must change the production model; the current situation is completely unsustainable.”

It is the first time that the environmental organization has conducted a simultaneous tour on two ships in Spain, the famous icebreaker Arctic Sunrise and the sailing boat Witness.. The first of them started the tour in Bilbao on June 7, continued towards Vilagarcía de Arousa and the next stop will be Palma de Mallorca, from June 21 to 23, to celebrate Spain’s ratification of the Global Ocean Treaty and the protection of our seas.