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.

When you think of organic food, you probably think of healthy, sustainable, and environmentally friendly food, labeled with a whole lot of “free” adjectives –– pesticide-free, chemical-free, hormone-free…you get the idea. But do you think of fish as organic?

This week, the National Organics Standards Board (NOSB) –– a part of the United States Department of Agriculture –– will recommend allowing fish raised in aquaculture operations (otherwise known as fish farms) to be certified as organic and to carry the official USDA organic label. Specifically, the board will consider allowing the use of fishmeal from wild fish and open–net pens for fish raised in aquaculture facilities.

What does this mean for consumers? Well, it means that fish you eat from aquaculture facilities could be bad for your health and bad for the environment. Aquaculture feed is comprised of fishmeal and oil from wild fish, and commonly contains PCBs, dioxin, mercury, and other pollutants that are hazardous to human health. And, raising fish in open–net pens promotes pollution from fish waste, and can spread disease and parasites to wild fish populations.

Does this sound organic to you? Judging from this guy's reaction, we'd say not.

Currently, the U.S. government wants to expand aquaculture into the open ocean (3 to 200 miles from shore), and have even more fish raised in environmentally unsustainable conditions. However, while the federal government has spent millions of dollars funding offshore aquaculture research and demonstration projects on both U.S. coasts and in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, the commercial viability of the fledgling industry has yet to be proven. Check out our new report Fishy Farms, The Problems with Open Ocean Aquaculture, which discusses this in more detail, and talks about how these commercial–scale fish farms will fail to meet basic organic criteria.

- Erin Greenfield
email • bio

Sigh. NOAA’s at it once again.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has the bright idea of promoting open ocean aquaculture as a way to reduce the country’s $9.2 billion seafood trade deficit and ease pressures on decimated wild marine fish populations. The government has spent more than $25 million supporting four experimental fish farms, as well as research into this technology, which involves growing tens of thousands of fish in cages anchored to the seafloor between three and 200 miles off the U.S. coast. The government wants to open public waters for the potential construction of thousands of these cages.

Sounds like a good plan in theory, but wait. Despite this substantial financial and political support, open ocean aquaculture has not been shown to be environmentally sustainable, financially viable, or technically possible on a commercial scale. In fact, each of the four taxpayer-supported experimental operations––in Hawaii, New Hampshire, and Puerto Rico––continues to be plagued by problems. For instance, cages and other equipment have broken, fish have died on a large scale, and sharks have threatened workers (surprise). At one aquaculture facility, each pound of fish sold costs about $3,000 in U.S. taxpayer money to produce. Ouch.

Matter of fact, the government’s own researchers say that open ocean fish farms could cause the same kind of problems linked to near-shore salmon farms, which dump chemical-laden waste directly into the ocean, produce fish that contain PCBs and other toxins, release genetically inferior fish that might mate with wild fish, and use massive amounts of fishmeal made from depleted wild fish stocks.

At this point, you might be asking yourself, “What can be done” ?

• For starters, get the facts about fish farming in our new report, Fishy Farms.
  
• You can help keep our ocean clean and safe by telling Congress to protect our oceans, coastal communities, and seafood safety.
  
• If you happen to be in the Gulf in December, feel free to attend one of our public hearings to let the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council know how you feel about commercial-scale fish farming in the Gulf of Mexico. While you're at it, kick back and listen to the Gulf Council's proposal in Issue 18 of SnackCast.
• And last but not least, make sustainable choices when choosing your favorite seafood dinner with our handy wallet-sized smart seafood guide.

Just in time for Halloween, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council––advisory body that helps create fishing regulations in the region––is hoping to approve a scary ocean fish farming plan soon. The plan would allow destructive commercial-scale fish farming in Gulf of Mexico, and would threaten the environment, human health, and communities throughout the Gulf.

This past weekend a large fish––not actually a fish, but a Mardi Gras-inspired costume––visited the Voodoo Music Experience in City Park, New Orleans (as you can see in these photos), letting festival goers know about negative impacts associated with open ocean aquaculture, which involves dividing up and giving away our oceans to private, often foreign-based, companies that grow fish in large net pens and cages three to 200 miles of the coast.

Today, the fish is continuing on to the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council meeting in Biloxi, Mississippi along with fisher men and women, concerned citizens, elected officials, environmental advocates, students and scientists to express their concerns and urge the Gulf Council to seriously consider the risks involved with commercial-scale fish farming and to give the public more opportunity to comment on and participate in this process.

Food & Water Watch recently released a report entitled Offshore Aquaculture: Bad News for the Gulf that examines the possible negative economic consequences of ocean fish farming in the Gulf of Mexico. The report concludes that “based on experience elsewhere, the practice of offshore aquaculture, combined with the influx of farmed fish imports, could threaten the economic wellbeing of the Gulf’s active fishing industries.”

Let’s hope the Gulf’s plan ends up RIP soon….

Read the report, Offshore Aquaculture: Bad News for the Gulf, and listen to a podcast discussion about open ocean aquaculture and the Gulf.

Then take action and tell the Gulf Council to do the right thing and seek more input before diving into uncharted waters. More than 8000 people have already written to the Gulf Council asking them to look before they leap into this dangerous new industry. Join them by adding your name.

Welcome to Issue 18 of SnackCast.

Next week The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council will discuss their plan to streamline the permitting and regulation of open-ocean fish farming. Food & Water Watch, as well as other fishing and conservation groups, talk about how the Gulf Council's proposal could lead to environmental and economic disaster in the region.

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Three little news items from this week to inform and amuse:

1. That "offshore aquaculture in Gulf of Mexico 'may yield economic distress"'" won't surprise you if you've been following our work on the issue.

2. What might is that law enforcement has been enlisted to recapture escaped culinary (though not biological) relatives of farmed fish as we discovered in the same issue of FishUpdate.com where we found our news story above. Saucy crayfish.

3. A compromise on the before-mentioned controversy over allowing interstate shipment of state inspected meat has been announced and would be a victory for producers and consumers alike.  Read the coalition press statement and letter here.

do you think Wal-Mart? 

Yeah, we don't either.

Earlier this month, the Big Box Collaborative announced the release of “Wal-Mart Sustainability Initiative: A Civil Society Critique” written by 23 organizations and analyzing Wal-Mart's smoke in mirrors sustainability initiatives. This report calls on Wal-Mart to reframe their sustainability efforts so that workers, the environment and communities are all respected.  Here are a couple excerpts from the sections Food & Water Watch contributed:

Food Safety

Ultimately, food retailers like Wal-Mart need to pay producers a fair price for their products so our food supply is not coming entirely from the lowest cost producers in places with lax safety standards and no labor protections.

Sustainable Seafood

In 2006, Wal-Mart announced that is was dedicated to selling only sustainable seafood in North American stores within three to five years. . . . The company’s foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, is funding Conservation International, which is collaborating with Wal-Mart and the [Marine Stewardship Council] to develop standards for sustainably sourced seafood. The reality is that it is impossible within the  big-box model that Wal-Mart operates.

Read more about Wal-Mart and organics, illegal logging, toxic toys, and other critical issues or find out about the Big Box Collaborative international day of action here.

The Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Media and Democracy have set up a new website that will help citizens track issues before their elected representatives in Congress. They're calling it Congresspedia.

You can find your member of Congress and read up on pending legislation.  We're partial to the page about open ocean aquaculture.

Happy surfing.

It’s in hog feed; it’s in poultry feed; it’s in fish feed. It’s melamine, known as plastic to the rest of us, yum!

Kona Blue, the industrial fish farming operation that Food & Water Watch criticized in our Seas of Doubt report and here on the blog, has announced that its fish were fed melamine laced feed and has suspended sales.

The whole melamine experience just highlights the woefully inadequate job the federal government is doing at protecting American consumers in the face of rising imports. Yesterday, Food & Water Watch released a little analysis of import refusals for veterinary drug residues in seafood (again, yum!). It turns out that without increasing inspections, contaminated shipments are up dramatically in the first four months of 2007. Read the whole analysis here.

We were pleased to see that Washington Post environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin graced the pages of the Food section today in an excellent article about the challenge of managing the ocean fisheries in a sustainable manner as seafood demand continues to rise. The article discussed the trap of shifting from consumption of one fish to another as more and more favorite fish populations become depleted.

Given that the Bush Administration, many members of Congress, and some of the media seem to have bought into the myth (hook, line, and sinker) that fish farming will save us, it was refreshing to read an article that acknowledged the problems with popular fish farm methods. 

Many chefs serve farm-raised fish on the grounds that farming operations do not deplete wild fish stocks. . . .  but scientists and environmental activists say the open-water fish farms that produce them can pollute the ocean while consuming vast amounts of smaller, wild fish as feed for the salmon.

While the Post article was a bit short on solutions, it did highlight some of the great work of chefs who are leading the way toward sustainable seafood consumption.

Cram tens of thousands of animals into industrial size cages offshore, toss in their feed (ground up wild fish), and let all the waste (and the occasional escaped fish) wash out to sea or pollute the sea floor and you’ve got open ocean aquaculture.  Tell Congress No.

Read more.

Most shrimp consumed in the United States is imported from East Asia and Latin America, where it was raised in industrial shrimp farms. If you are reading this, you are probably at least familiar with some of the environmental and social devastation caused by these operations.

We were sadly reminded of this devastation recently when security guards at Acqua Clara shrimp farm in Brazil murdered Francisco Cordeiro da Rocha. It is quite clear that industrial shrimp farming has yet to evolve from the violence that has taken so many innocent lives over the years.

On April 9th, Francisco and his friend Vilson Oliveira do Carmo had gone out to hunt waterfowl nearby the shrimp farm, a traditional activity in the region. When Francisco entered the shrimp farm to take a detour around an area too muddy to walk through, security guards shot him immediately. Then guards shot at Vilson, but thankfully he was able to escape.

Community members present during an interview a few days later told about the horrors they have experienced at the hands of Acqua Clara. These include difficulty in obtaining information on the case, the violence towards the farm’s employees, the environmental destruction caused by the farm, and the poor working conditions.

This tragedy reminds us of the true costs of consuming cheap, imported shrimp. Its production comes at the expense of the environment and communities, and on a sad day this April, it cost Francisco Cordeiro da Rocha his life.

The National Organics Standards Board accepted the recommendations of a panel for the proper use of the USDA’s organic label for seafood on Thursday. However, the board delayed its decision on whether or not to allow fish farmed in open-net cages and fish fed wild-caught feed use the labels.

Ladies and Gentlemen, simply put, this means we are all going to die.

Neil Anthony Sims, President of the open ocean fish farm Kona Blue, had the following to say about his disappointment in the NOSB’s decision to defer such recommendations:

“Establishing Organic seafood standards for marine fish – fish raised in net pens, and fed with fish meal and fish oil – could result in a sustainable increase in American consumption of seafood. And that will save lives, just as surely, as, say, a reduction in cigarette smoking will save lives.”

Whhhhaaaaaaaattttttt?????????

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! On behalf of Food & Water Watch, Thank you Mr. Sims for the great laugh.

The wonderful world of text messaging just got a little bigger with the launching of a new service by Friend of the Sea. Consumers can now receive detailed information about a particular seafood’s environmental status by sending a text message with the species name and Friend of the Sea will immediately respond with a comprehensive description of the most recent stock assessment and fishing method impact and selectivity.

If the fishery is sustainable, the system will say it’s a good choice. If the fishery is unsustainable, the stock is depleted or on the IUCN Red List of endangered species, the consumer is informed about the conservation concerns regarding the fishery.

Although the concept itself is great, Friend of the Sea may not be the certification program that appropriately determines whether a fishery is sustainable or not. We are particularly concerned about any group that certifies farmed fish that are raised offshore. Yikes! The escapement of these confined fish alone is responsible for massive damage to wild fish stocks around the globe.

Still, this text service looks slightly better than the ones advertised on late night TV commercials that offer to send you a hilarious joke for 99 cents (“you will be the funniest person in the room!”) or the pricier ones that promise to send a sexy message (Oooo baby.)

I came across some disturbing news today that reinforces all of the million reasons we already have to denounce irresponsible agriculture that uses pesticides and herbicides. Before this kind of food poisons our bodies, growing it poisons our land. And when it rains, that poison lands itself in our oceans and waterways.

The brown, green and aqua colors are the runoff against the blue, which is the reef itself. Image credit: CSIRO/GeoScience Australia

The latest victim is the Great Barrier Reef, which is acknowledged as one of the world’s most important natural assets. It’s the largest natural feature on earth stretching more than 2,300km along the northeast coast of Australia from the northern tip of Queensland to just north of Bundaberg.

Sadly, a recent series of satellite photos obtained by CSIRO scientists show over 135 kilometers of pesticides, herbicides and other micropollutant-ridden plumes extending offshore.

Recent studies have shown that even miniscule amounts of agricultural chemicals are so poisonous to coral that it can prevent spawning, therefore hindering the reef’s ability to regenerate and protect itself.

CSIRO scientist Arnold Dekker calls this “a good example of nature being a bit more complex than we think” and states that “it’s a no-brainer to say that if farmers are helped to farm as smart as possible, using as little fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides as possible, and only using what vegetation will take up, then you will have much less run-off of this material.”

A no-brainer indeed.

El Nino rears its ugly head again.

So does yet another disastrous incident involving fish farms. A four-month drought caused by the infamous ocean-atmosphere phenomenon was recently responsible for furthering the environmentally tragic track record of fish farms. More than 1,300 tons of farm-raised fish suffocated to death in southern Colombia when the drought drained a reservoir to dangerously low levels.

This amounts to some three million fish.

Blazing temperatures lowered oxygen-rich reservoir levels by 15 feet in recent months, sending giant metal cages crammed with fish floating to the surface of the Betania hydroelectric dam where the fish were confined.

Colombia’s government has temporarily banned the sale of fish produced in Betania’s hatcheries to protect consumers from possibly contaminated fillets.

The environment, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be guaranteed any protection as we continue to read story after story of how packing thousands of fish into cages has led to one environmental disaster on top of another. Instead, we get plans to litter our ocean with thousands of these polluting cages. 

Kentucky Fried Chicken made me throw up a little today. And it wasn’t because I ate too many greasy tortured birds out of a large paper bucket, but rather because the self-love back at corporate headquarters is becoming a tad hard to stomach.

KFC President Gregg Dedrick sent a personal letter to Pope Benedict XVI this week, asking him to bless KFC’s new Fish Snacker sandwich. This is extremely exciting, as not only is Lenten season upon us, but this is the first time the world’s most popular chicken restaurant chain is offering fish!!!! WAHOO!!!!!!!!

The Pope has yet to respond. We can only pray the sandwich will receive the blessing, as it is only 99 cents. Food that economical just reeks of quality.

The last time KFC’s abounding self-love starting ailing me was upon reading that they are petitioning the United States Postal Service for a special Kentucky Fried Chicken postal stamp. Oh yes, they sure are.

Luckily my girl Pamela Anderson is all over this one.

Also helping me recover from the KFC-induced nausea is all the fun people who went through the trouble of giving KFC “the bird.” Call me immature. I don’t care. This is funny.

    Creative Commons Licensed Flickr Photo
    Originally uploaded by Write from Karen.

This week, Mother Nature saw fit to evaporate a bunch of the ocean into clouds and then dump it in the form of snow over much of the United States. That snowfall will feed mountain streams or trickle into the bedrock and recharge aquifers when it melts this spring – part of the earth’s hydrologic cycle that, among other things, turns ocean water into drinking water for people. But, there are some corporations that would rather eliminate Mother Nature as a middle(wo)man, oh, and have the taxpayer subsidize them to do it.

One of our staff nearly fell of the treadmill at the gym when GE’s latest Eco-imagination greenwashing* ad promoting taking the salt out of ocean water appeared on the TV monitor over head. The ad featuring exuberant Norwegian fishermen (see fishing) left out a few crucial facts.

Even the most expensive advertising firm can’t change the fact that the industry isn’t nearly as elegant as Mother Nature and desalination plants pose environmental threats to coastal ecosystems, are energy hogs, and are extremely expensive. What’s more, there may be chemical byproducts of desalination left in drinking water that we aren’t even considering because the EPA’s drinking water regulations were designed for the kinds of contaminants found in rivers and groundwater.

*No, they haven’t gotten the PCBs out of the Hudson yet.

Dallas, Texas Mayor Laura Miller is more than a little irritated.

Texas, which already ranks number one in the nation in mercury emissions, is the next state to suffer from what Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell so accurately calls a story of energy, corruption and greed. An electric-power company known as TXU has announced plans to build eleven new coal plants in Texas by 2011, doubling its current pollution. Congress is expected to crack down on global warming within the next five years, creating an industry rush to build over 150 new plants in hopes of being exempt from these new regulations. In addition to dumping hundreds of millions of tons of carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere each year, coal fired power plants are by far the nation’s largest unregulated source of mercury pollution, with the industry’s pollution-related costs falling onto the shoulders of the public. And the public is tired of it. That’s why TXU’s John Wilder (who was the eleventh highest-paid executive in America in 2005) is meeting opposition from Laura Miller and citizens from more than thirty cities and towns in Texas.

What does this have to do with food? Sadly, a whole lot.

This year, in the most widespread survey of mercury in the nation’s streams, researchers from Oregon State University and the EPA found mercury in every single fish of the 2,700 species analyzed. The fact that it was present in every single fish suggests an atmospheric source of the contaminant, proving the battle to protect our food supply relies heavily on the protection of our environment from corporate polluters like TXU. The health effects from mercury exposure are nothing to brush off, and consuming contaminated fish is the primary way people in the U.S. are exposed.

TXU and others like them try to greenwash our concerns away, sending toxicologists to city council meetings where they claim that mercury isn’t really that bad. You know the story. But the more active we are in our opposition to this arrogance and greed, the better. Laura Miller’s Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition, which will now have a voice in the permitting process, certainly speaks for all of us.

Wal Mart. You may remember them from such things as violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, forcing employees to work off the clock, or denying their employees a wage that covers basic needs. Or perhaps you remember footing the bill for this outrageous greed. The Democratic Staff Of The Committee On Education And The Work Force found that Wal Mart employees were eligible for $2.5 billion dollars in federal assistance in 2004.

Or maybe you remember them as being that company which marks non-organic items as organic.

But that's all besides the point. I mean, Wal Mart is an environmental steward after all. That's why the increasingly industry driven Seafood Choices Alliance granted Wal Mart's Peter Redmond the Seafood Champion award for his "outstanding leadership in promoting environmentally responsible seafood." This is great news, as Wal Mart does so much to help the environment.

Between 2003 and 2005, state and federal environmenal agencies have only had to fine Wal Mart $5 million!

In May 2004, Wal-Mart agreed to pay the largest settlement for stormwater violations in EPA history. The United States sued Wal-mart for violating the Clean Water Act in 9 states, calling for penalties of over $3.1 million and changes to Wal-Mart’s building practices.

In 2004, Wal-Mart was fined $765,000 for violating Florida’s petroleum storage tank laws at its automobile service centers. Wal-Mart failed to register its fuel tanks, failed to install devices that prevent overflow, did not perform monthly monitoring, lacked current technologies, and blocked state inspectors.

In 2005, Wal-Mart reached a $1.15 million settlement with the State of Connecticut for allowing improperly stored pesticides and other pollutants to pollute streams. This was the largest such settlement in state history.