Europe needs to cultivate more fish, the ministers in charge have decided. Green groups disagree, saying aquaculture creates more problems than it solves. Yet at the Fisheries Council meeting in Luxembourg the ministers said Asia and other parts of the world are moving ahead in this area, while Europe has stagnated over the past ten years.

They therefore asked the European Commission to make further specific proposals in the matter by the end of this year. This is largely a question of providing economic help for the sector and allaying criticisms. Ecologists say it does not add up, that aquaculture makes little sense when it takes up to six kilos of wild fishfeed to raise one kilo of the farmed product. They point to concentrations of effluent polluting waterways or coastal habitats, and they say that antibiotics used on farms have had a disastrous effect on entire marine basins.More about: Ecology, EU Commission, Fishery

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