Aquaponics: A System For Food Security

By 2050, the world population will reach nearly 9.5 billion, which effectively means that we have to produce 70% more food for over two billion additional mouths.

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Hence, the food and agriculture systems need to adapt fast to the changing climate and become more resilient, productive and sustainable. This would require judicious use of natural resources. A plant consumes more water to produce food compared to us to survive in a day. As a matter of fact 15,000 litres of water is needed to produce one kilo of meat. This is why, with a growing population increasingly changing its diet towards 'waterhungry' products, all efforts must be made to improve the way we use water in agriculture to make the best out of the limited water resources. Aquaculture is one of the important source of protein production and accounts for almost onehalf of the fish eaten globally. Aquaculture has the potential to decrease the pressure on the world's fisheries and to significantly reduce the footprint of less sustainable terrestrial animal farming systems in supplying humans with animal protein. However, two aspects of aquaculture may be addressed to improve the sustainability of this agricultural technique. One major problem for the sustainability of aquaculture is the treatment of nutrient-rich wastewater, which is a by-product of all the aquaculture methods mentioned above. Depending on the environmental regulations set by each country, farmers must either treat or dispose of the effluent, which can be both expensive and environmentally harmful. Without treatment, the release of nutrient-rich water can lead to eutrophication and hypoxia in the watershed and localized coastal areas, as well as macroalgae overgrowth of coral reefs and other ecological and economical disturbances. Growing plants within the effluent stream is one method of preventing its release into the environment and of obtaining additional economic benefits from crops growing with costless by-products through irrigation, artificial wetlands, and other techniques. Therefore, as a catalyst of crisis and food insecurity; an aquaponics system will serve the purpose of p