Aquaculture, the farming of aquatic organisms, is amongst the few animal food production sectors that has continued to show strong growth over the last 30 years and over the last decade achieved a annual increase of 7.5% compared with 2.5% for meat production. This blue revolution perhaps marks the last phase in animal domestication and the prognosis for sustainable growth of the global sector is good. In 2000 around 45.7 million tonnes of aquatic produce valued at US$ 56.5 billion was produced.

The public’s relationship with agriculture is complex and multi-facetted. Agriculture not only produces a large proportion of the food we eat, but is also responsible for maintaining the majority of the landscape and countryside. The public are customers for both of these activities and for a variety of other services provided by farmers, whether in the narrow sense of paying directly for them or, more widely, as users or benefiting indirectly. The Curry report stressed the need for farmers to reconnect both to the environment and to their customers. Given that the theme of this conference is reconnecting the food chain, this presentation will concentrate mostly on the latter, but I will demonstrate that the sustainability of the farming industry depends critically on getting all these aspects right.