The Potential for Seaweed Culture to Provide Ecosystem Services and Useful Products

The oceans cover 70% of Earth yet they yield only 1.5% (117 million metric tons (mt)) of the 7.6 billion mt of food that we produce each year. Can we make more productive use of them? If so, how and, in light of challenges now faced by global agriculture, should we try? This paper addresses these questions by looking at seaweed farming and the idea that a parallel, photosynthetically driven system of food production, a 'Marine Agronomy', could be developed at sea to supplement the food we grow on land.