Translator: Martina Verdún Reviewer: Denise RQ
This picture here shows a group of fishermen
in Sierra Leona, outside West Africa
pondering over the day's catch.
As you can see, in their nets,
the fish there or rather, the sad remains of what could be fish,
will not be enough to feed them or their families.
This is a situation that is similar to coastal regions all over the world
so local fisheries simply cannot sustain their communities anymore
due to overfishing,
and overfishing is due to industrial reduction fisheries.
The reason is this -- large-scale trawl fishing.
This net contains 400 tons of jack mackerel,
400 tons in one single net.
These nets can span entire square kilometers,
they are super trawlers carrying nets
which supposedly, can fit up to 13 jumbo jets in one single net;
13 jumbo jets in one single net.
The amount of Jack mackerel in the ocean has decreased
from 30 million tons
to a little bit less than three million tons in just two decades.
This is absolute insanity.
What is, perhaps, most insane of it all,
is that this fish is not even used for food,
so you can go ahead and continue eating
your Marine Stewardship Council certified fish;
this is used for reduction fisheries going into, mainly, feed.
Our oceans are actually on the verge of collapse
so 80% of the fish stocks
are already fully exploited or over exploited.
The World Wildlife Foundation came with a report last year
that showed that over half of life in the ocean has disappeared
within the last 30 years.
Think of it:
more than half of life in the oceans just gone, like that.
There are scenarios by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization
that our fisheries might collapse in 2048.
That is a little bit more than 30 years from now;
absolutely devastating.
As I said, this fish is not even used for food, it is used for feed.
If you think of the jack mackerel,
it takes five kilograms of jack mackerel to produce one kilogram of farm salmon --
insanity.
So 80% of this fish goes into fish meal
which is used to make feed for animals and other fish,
but 20% of it is going to fish oil,
and fish oil is used in omega-3, in dietary supplements,
that are absolutely necessary.
Omega-3 are fats absolutely necessary to our health
so it's a good thing that we make them.
However, the way we make them is not good,
and especially this 20% that goes into fish oil
and high-end products such as dietary supplements
are really the driving forces of overfishing
because they make it profitable.
Of course, people are doing something about it,
and this picture shows a Greenpeace activist
just outside the coast of West Africa.
I love this picture because I love the image of the heroic spirit;
it shows our courage,
it shows our resistance as humans,
but it also shows our helplessness
against the huge powers that are in place here.
Of course, the driving force for overfishing is business and profit.
The unfortunate and sad truth is
I do not believe that Greenpeace activists will be able ever to stop
something so profitable as overfishing is.
Don't get me wrong here, I think activism is extremely important;
it's extremely important that we call to action,
it's extremely important that we have people and organizations
that call up on what's wrong in the world and that demand change.
We need that.
However, we cannot wait for regulations to come into place,
and we cannot trust simple awareness will bring about change.
We need to empower change.
The most powerful game changer
is actually using the same mechanism that drives overfishing in the first place
and that is business and profit.
One way to do it is to go back and look at nature
and see what solutions she has in her back pockets,
because the irony of omega-3 is that it's actually not produced by fish
so we wouldn't need to use fish oil in the first place.
One of the wonders of nature, I feel, is photosynthesis.
That is the capability of plants
to take sunlight and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
and produce oxygen
and all kinds of nutritional substances, materials, energy, and so on;
the things we need and use today.
Then a special interesting kind of plants that does this are the microalgae.
Microalgae are unicellular, little tiny plants, you can say
that live in all Earth's aquatic environments
and still produce 70% of all the oxygen that we breath today,
but they also produce a lot of essential nutrients,
nutrients that are essential to life of animals and humans,
because they are at the bottom of what we call the marine food chain.
One of the compounds that these microalgae produce
are, actually, omega-3s,
the same omega-3s that end up in the fish oil,
the fish oil that is one of the drives of overfishing.
This is one of these fantastic cases where you can just say,
"Could we somehow do something about it?"
"Could we industrialize growing algae?"
"Could we commercialize omega-3 from algal oil instead of fish oil?"
By that, we could simply wipe out the need for the middle fish,
we could make overfishing less profitable
by simply making algal oil so much superior to anything else
that nobody would want to buy these fish oils anymore.
That is exactly what we set out to do.
The picture here shows what I would like to call
a factory of the future.
There will be many kinds of factories of the future that will look different,
but I think a lot of our future industry will be based
on different kinds of plant-based photosynthetic processes.
We often talk about the bio-based economy,
and this is one example.
You have Fredrick here walking around in the greenhouses
where we have those so-called photobioreactors,
where we grow our microalgae by photosynthesis to produce omega-3s.
He's not sitting there alone
in this rubber boat in front of a large-scale trawler,
he's going around there, and he can just poke around and say,
"Screw you, fish oil industry! We're doing this better."
This is what we do,
and this is how we simply get an omega-3 that is better for the planet
with the same health benefits and everything.
You're laughing in front of me.
The thing here is this is just one example.
If you look at the food industry,
if you look at fisheries, if you look at agriculture,
they pose some of the biggest challenges that we face in our society.
The way that we produce our food is simply not sustainable,
the impact that fisheries and agriculture have in our environment
are absolutely not sustainable.
We are in desperate need of disruption of the supply chain within this industry.
We need new and better ways to produce things.
Unfortunately, it's not enough
to rely on consumer awareness and Eco certifications,
It's not enough that some of us turn vegan so that we start eating crickets.
It is not enough we go out there in rubber boats
and fight against the big trawlers.
It is also not enough to wait for regulations,
because politics and political processes are very, very slow.
What we need is simply a new breed of capitalists, so to speak,
people who start companies, who run companies and are actually able,
through innovation, to disrupt the existing food chain,
the existing supply chain of the food industry.
This is a very, very important movement,
and that's why I believe
the only way we can bring about change
is, actually, by using the same system as we are operating in,
which is business, and profit, and capitalism,
because these are the strongest drivers that we have in the world today,
as sad as it sounds.
I do think that we need to work together with activists,
we do need to work together with all of the community
as consumers that we are,
but also, we must think of companies
as part of society and as part of the community,
use the positive forces that are in place here to bring about change.
That is, I think, what we can do by the means of business and profit.
Thank you.
(Applause)