Dr. Alejandro Buschmann of the i-mar Center spoke at the event on “Aquaculture for Food and Sustainable Development”.

Dr. Alejandro Buschmann, researcher at the i-mar Center of the University of Los Lagos and member of the CeBiB (Center for Biotechnology and Bioengineering) was one of the invited experts on aquaculture matters at this week’s Millennium Global Conference on Aquaculture led by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in conjunction with the Network of Aquaculture Centers in Asia-Pacific (NACA) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China.

The congress whose theme is “Aquaculture for Food and Sustainable Development” is held every 10 years and represents the roadmap for optimizing the role aquaculture can play in achieving the 2030 agenda for sustainable development.

“Here we establish the milestones of how aquaculture has been developing in terms of the challenges that have been met and also establish what goals need to be met to make the activity more sustainable, and whether it could be affected by climate change, among other major issues,” explains Dr. Buschmann.

In particular, the presentations by the researcher from the Univesity of Los Lagos focused on significant innovations in the cultivation of species such as salmon and algae, as well as on the technologies and use of production systems.

Within the framework of this international congress, which lasted from September 22 to 25, different working groups have been established to prepare reports and material to deepen the different topics, which, according to the researcher, will be available for review, since each expert’s intervention cannot exceed certain allotted minutes.

The challenge facing aquaculture in this new decade is that it has become the main source of aquatic food, which is expected to meet the world’s growing food demand and at the same time, address the food security needs of the poorest.

“Aquaculture in the last 10 years has had a very large growth, it is the fastest growing food producing area in the world. Normally we used to see that fishing was what provided the most food for the human population, and aquaculture had a relatively small proportion of fishing, but today aquaculture is already producing more organisms than fishing. It has been transforming into a product more similar to what agriculture and livestock used to be and where the connection between food production systems on land and in the sea are becoming more and more interdependent,” explains Dr. Buschmann.

Although in the production scale for aquaculture, the west represents a smaller number compared to the east, there has been a significant increase in aquaculture production, which is mainly for freshwater fish (which Chile does not produce), seaweed, mollusks and after that crustaceans and marine fish.

“I hope that the result of this event will set a trend in what will be done in the next 10 years and Chile will be influenced by that, Chile is one of the largest aquaculture producers in the West, although we are much lower than other countries in Asia, we are one of the leaders in the West. Reports like these of the FAO tend to mark lines of work and emphasis on certain types of technologies, approaches to face more successfully sustainable activities, with less environmental impact, therefore what emerges here will reach all the countries of the world and will allow to mobilize the policies of each one of the countries”, adds the researcher.

All this work produced within the framework of the congress will be set out in the Shanghai Declaration prepared by a group of world-renowned aquaculture experts and then shared with other members of this congress to become a duly balanced proposal.