Offshore Aquaculture = Factory Farms

During the last year and a half, we have been overloaded with non–stop reminders about numerous imported seafood safety problems. This opened consumers' eyes to the fact that the majority of the seafood that we eat is imported from Asia and Latin America, regions that have potentially unsafe production practices. Claiming to have discovered the solution to U.S. reliance on imported seafood, NOAA and the Bush administration are promoting legislation that would allow federal ocean waters to be leased out for industrial fish farming (aka offshore aquaculture, open water aquaculture, or open ocean aquaculture).

Offshore aquaculture involves cramming thousands of potentially high-value fish, such as cobia and cod, into large cages in U.S. federal waters –– between three and 200 miles from shore. These ocean equivalents of the land-based factory farms that jam together thousands of pigs, chickens, and cows could threaten the marine environment, human health, wild fish populations, and local fishermen and coastal communities.

Such operations can pollute the surrounding marine environment with fish waste, excess fish feed, and chemicals. Cramped conditions that cause higher stress than in the wild can make farmed fish prone to diseases and parasites, which would likely be treated with antibiotics, pesticides, and other chemicals. Both the diseases and chemicals can be transmitted to wild fish through the open net pens. Wild fish populations can also be harmed when farmed fish escape from their pens and compete for resources or interbreed and weaken the wild genetic stock.

Not only is the push for offshore aquaculture reckless, its purported benefits are highly questionable. The administration’s campaign for ocean fish farming is blind to the current trends in the global seafood trade. Our country exports more than 70 percent of its high-quality wild-caught and farmed seafood, while importing cheaper seafood from countries such as China and Thailand, which have spotty food safety records. Meanwhile, Japan and Europe have high seafood safety standards and receive nearly half of U.S. exports. Makes a lot of sense, huh?

Things You Need to Know

• Only 19 percent of the seafood available to U.S. consumers is from this country because the U.S. exports 71 percent of U.S.-produced seafood.
• If we did not export U.S.-caught and farmed seafood, 66 percent of the seafood available to U.S. consumers would be from the good old U.S. of A.
• About 17 percent of the seafood available to U.S. consumers is from China and about 12 percent is from Thailand.
• We export 20 percent of U.S.-caught seafood to Europe and 13 percent to Japan where seafood safety standards are high.
• We export 69 percent of U.S.-caught salmon. Only 20 percent of the salmon available to U.S. consumers is from the United States, while about 36 percent is farmed salmon from Chile, where food safety and labor standards are questionable.
• We export 12 percent of U.S.-caught seafood to China, the world’s center of seafood processing for re-export back to the United States.
• Nearly 15 percent of U.S. wild salmon is shipped to China, where it is processed and shipped back to the United States. We export about 45,000 metric tons of unprocessed wild salmon to China. We then import close to 52,000 metric tons of processed salmon back from China.
• We ship 12 percent of U.S. cod to China where it is processed and then sent back to the United States.
• The United States has lost about 13 percent of its seafood processing and canning jobs in the past decade.
• Hypothetically, assuming current seafood trade patterns and consumption remain constant, the United States would have to produce about 36 billion pounds of seafood through ocean farming in order to offset the 10.6 billion pounds of imports that are consumed domestically.

Curious? Find out more in our new report, Fish Story. To make your trip to the seafood counter a bit easier, carry our Smart Seafood Guide with you. Remember to ask about your seafood’s country of origin, too.