America's appetite for seafood skyrockets each year, sometimes by as much as 10 percent. And as the demand for seafood grows, so too does the demand for more fish farms. There simply aren't enough wild fish to feed the nation’s insatiable appetite—wild fish stocks are drastically declining.
Until now, most commercial fish and seafood farming, also called aquaculture, has taken place within state waters near the coast. Never before have fish been farmed in federal waters, which begin three nautical miles from the nation’s shorelines.
But that might be about to change.
Five years ago, the Bush administration proposed farming fish in federal waters. That proposal, in which the administration sought to allow the farms up to 200 miles beyond the coast, never made it past the idea stage. It died in Congress (twice), mainly because the sustainability of such fish farms was questioned by marine scientists, fishermen, and conservation groups.
Those who opposed the open-water farms posed several questions the government couldn't answer. How would the fish sewage be discharged? Wouldn’t these fish farms require the use of antibiotics, pesticides and other chemicals that may be harmful to the surrounding marine ecosystem? What if non-native species escape the farms? And what about the possibility of spreading disease and parasites to wild populations? As I noted in that post about the State of Seafood report, it takes several pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed fish, and half of the seafood consumed by humans comes from aquaculture.
Despite those very real concerns, the Feds are trying their hand again at fish farming in the open sea. The Obama administration is putting together a set of rules to govern ocean aquaculture. As the Ventura County Star reports, the new rules, which may be decided as early as summer 2010, will lay out the permitting process for these ocean-based aquaculture operations.
But as Barry Eastabrook reported last fall in the sadly now-defunct Gourmet magazine, the approval of offshore aquaculture came to fruition through a peculiar measure:
"[Last] January, the Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council, which is charged by the federal government to oversee fisheries in the Gulf, presented NOAA with a plan that allowed for off-shore aquaculture. The plan was unpopular for the same reasons as the thwarted legislation—but a loophole in the law says that if NOAA fails to act on a fisheries-management plan by a set deadline, then the plan automatically goes into effect. That deadline passed (in September 2009).”
As Eastabrook reported, those groups which oppose offshore fish farming, such as the Food and Water Watch, the Center for Food Safety and the Institute for Fisheries Resources, believe it’s unacceptable for NOAA, the agency tasked with protecting the nation’s oceans, to allow development of what some are calling “factory farms in the sea.”
Ivan Walsh's Flickr photostream/Creative Commons
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