Its easy to see why the fishing industry is bullish on Tuna farming. Imagine the prospects of farming this exquisitely revered fruits de mer. One can easily expand the demand for this exquisite culinary fish without compromising on what is already a difficult and collapsing wild population stock, if the method could be perfected. Research after a recent article about break-through progress as written on Times Magazine as an highly important innovation of 2009 maybe at this point, rather panglossian.

The idea of Tuna Aquaculture is not new. Like chickens or any commonly available livestock for meat, its is the semblance of the progression of  hunter-gatherer methods towards an industrial farming method. However, it is because farming tuna is not so much like rearing chicken and more akin to taming bisons for meat that has, till this day made Tuna farming still more elusive commercial practice unlike other species like Salmon and Cod. That while a tuna, may need as long as 12 years to reach sexual maturity, that they are voracious eaters, require plenty of space and still wild in relation to human civilization has not deterred the most dedicated of breeders, notably the Kinki University of Japan, CleanSeas Tuna Ltd Australia and Hawaii Ocean Technology.

Previous Tuna farming, cannot be considered as true aquaculture because its not a closed cycle in which Tunas were bred and grown from brood stocks, rather Fisherman herded wild Tuna into pens and fed them an artificial diet to rapidly increase their size and fat content. This has lead to an even greater demand of wild Tuna and have brought Mediterranean stocks of wild bluefin Tuna dangerously to the brink of collapse, this was highlighted 7 years ago in a 2002 - European WWF report.

Today, these companies are testing methods to increase the percentage of successful Tuna breeding to new heights by re-applying previous methods of growing stock as land based animals, such as spearing timed hormone injections to artificially boost sexual maturity and the development of more cost-effective feeding solutions. Feed made less of raw fish material, which are mainly made out of fishing out smaller fish species on which poor developed nations require and more out of vegetable material, such as soy beans, gluten and wheat.

That however, against the backdrop of a demanding new market of this profitable status rendering food item is merely inheriting the same problems that the chicken and bovine industry is going through. Namely land and coastal pollution through the negligent discharge of sewage and fecal matter and the increasing strain on agricultural land, fresh water and fossil fuels to supply the demand for luxury seafood.

An article on the Japanese Daily Yomiuri closes with a caution and advise to eat less ‘toro’, the prized fatty cut. “To keep enjoying ‘toro,’ we must exercise self-control,” it said.

Five NGO’s were invited by the American Chamber of Commerce to present their programs and how staff can be involved in the programs as volunteers. Marinedream has 2 staff programs:

1. Beach Cleanups; To protect our rivers and oceans from pollutants we organize every year a beach cleanup. Companies can join these cleanups for RMB 75 per person. For each person that attends the beach cleanup; a student volunteers will join.

2. Climate Change ambassadors: Initiatives by employees to reduce their carbon footprint in the office are awarded by the company to offset the same amount by planting real trees in Inner Mongolia.

In total 40 different companies attended this meeting.

Saturday November 20th, we have spent time working on the boat to get it ready for the Yangtze River project in 2010. A big group of volunteers from BEAN Shanghai decided to join us. BEAN is a networking, volunteering, and social group for young professionals in Shanghai. Their members can sign up for different volunteering events, and this day they chose to help us out.

The boat was docked at the Shanghai Sailing Club, where we arrived around 11 am, ready for some sanding action! We sanded off the orange paint and some of the handy men got into the boat and took off all parts of the boat that will not be used during the Yangtze River trip. The boat used to be a lifeboat, so it still had all kinds of life saving gear required to survive at sea (life vests, seatbelts, etcetera). This took up precious space that we will need for the projects’ equipment.

Shanghai Sailing Club has given us the possibility to leave the boat with them during the winter. In March we will move it to a workshop in Shanghai, which will make it easier to get to. At the moment we are putting together a team of handy men who will continue working on the boat in Spring.

A big thanks to all volunteers who helped us during this day!

We were in Wuhan to kickstart the project team for the Yangtze River and we combined it with being a guest speaker for the Wuhan AIESEC conference on Saturday November 14th. Around 150 people gathered together and enjoyed the lecture and workshop. As we are looking for trees for the freetrees website - AIESEC Wuhan has donated 20 trees.

On November 13 - 15 2009 we kickstarted our project teams from AIESEC to start calling schools if there was an interest to join the Green Power program in 2010. We selected 28 cities from Ybin to Shanghai.

The teams were very excited and in total we have 40 volunteers in Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan and Chonqing reaching out to 150 schools,

Helen from SISU is the national coordinator for AIESEC, Julie is the program Director for Marinedream Foundation.

Picture: team SISU

Marinedream was yesterday invited to come to the shipping wharf to select the boat for the Yangtze River trip! MAERSK work together on this shipping yard with the Chinese owner to dismantle old boats in an environmentally friendly way. First the chemical waste gets removed and asbestos and then the boats are cut up in pieces and sorted into piles of iron, aluminium etc for recycling. The lifeboat that has been donated to us come from the old Asian Panama.

Our team from Tongji University had the kickoff meeting last Sunday. Together with engineer Jean Nicolaas we will redesign this life vessel to a climate/energy friendly boat.

On Sunday we have had our workshop meetings with our volunteer groups of 3 universities: Shanghai International studies university, China Eastern Normal University and Tongji University.

Projects that they are working on:
- Fishmenu
- Outreach: blog
- Treecard Project
- Yangtze River Boat Project

Marinedream has been invited by AIESEC to give a workshop on environmental sustainability on Friday October 16th.

In total of the 300 delegates of ten universities from the Southern part of China joined this event and 65 of them joined our workgroup session. The conference was about UN Millenium goals, how students can play a role to help achieve these goals. Three of the 8 millenium goals were focus of this conference which were: environmental sustainability, HIV and social entrepeneurship.  In our workshop the students got an insight in how the three major themes of environmental degradation: climate change, pollution and biodiversity were related to our oceans and rivers and why we need to start taking action now. Second part of the workshop the students needed to think of ideas what they can do to protect our oceans and rivers. In total 8 groups presented their projects and many of their ideas were creating awareness, which is a great first step to achieve our goals of a cleaner ocean. They came up with ideas like photographing their environment and locate where the issues are and use internet as a medium.

I also met the presidents of the local chapter of AIESEC Nanjing, Wuhan and Chongqing and we will start preparing the arrangements for next year project the Yangtze River. Next week we will visit MAERSK and check the boat

We were very pleased to hear from Eelco from Stichting de Noordzee that we can use the old lifevessel from MAERSK for our Yangtze River trip in 2009. After our trip Stichting De Noordzee will use the vessel for research on the Northsea.

This is the first step to make that trip a reality!

AIESEC SISU will start on the 26^th of September to organize the Yangtze River Coordinators and 10 schools in 28 cities along the Yangtze River to join the program.

Further we found a Chinese hosting company willing to look after our hosting necessities. This is great news, because we will launch our outreach campaign after the October holidays.