Justin Fox, Columnist

Saving Fish By Farming Them

Boosting aquaculture -- especially in the lagging U.S. -- can help restore wild populations of our sea-dwelling friends.

July 14, 2016 at 3:24 PM UTC

By Justin Fox

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Know your fish.
Photographer: BORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images

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A major turning point in human history was reached in 2014. That was the first year that people ate more farmed fish1468447767928 than wild, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization announced last week1468498757620 in its biennial "The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture" report.

We humans still caught more wild fish (measured by weight) than we farmed in 2014, but about 12 percent of fish production went to non-people-food uses such as fish meal, which is in turn was fed mostly to farm animals, including fish. The FAO predicted that aquaculture will surpass wild-caught in terms of overall production in 2021, adding: