Ocean policy is a combination of U.S. laws, politics, ethics, and regulations that are used in managing our oceans and the assorted resources found within them –– like fish, oil, and natural gas. The United States has a 200 mile zone surrounding it, known as the “exclusive economic zone” (EEZ) almost equal in size to our land area, which, as the name indicates, is solely ours to manage for the benefit of our nation.

Our oceans and marine resources in the EEZ are public property –– meant to be shared by and used to equally benefit all U.S. citizens. Unfortunately, recent trends have been toward management that gives exclusive access to parts of our oceans or certain resources in them to private entities for economic profits.

For example, many of our popular seafood choices, like red snapper, are depleted and have too many people trying to catch too few fish. Our federal fish managers have developed a new system to control how many red snapper get caught each year and which people do the catching. But the system they put in place tends to reward those that can catch more fish quickly (like large companies rather than small scale and perhaps more sustainable community-based fishing), because the right to fish is often granted based on how much fish an individual (or company) caught in recent years.

Similarly, oil and gas companies have been given “rights” through leases to parts of our ocean to put up platforms for extracting oil and natural gas from the ocean floor. These platforms were initially required to be removed when the extraction process ended to return the site to its natural state, but now several programs have been developed to transition the platforms into other uses –– and allow oil and gas companies to save millions of dollars in removal costs. One such program is still being developed to allow platforms to be converted into ocean fish farms.

Another area of ocean policy that FWW works on is the development of desalination plants. Desalination is the process by which seawater gets turned into fresh water for human usage. To learn more about desalination, click here.

There are many opportunities to get involved in management decisions about our oceans –– things like attending public hearings where new laws are being discussed, writing letters to congressional representatives to ask for changes to existing laws, making phone calls to various elected officials and visiting your own regulators to talk about what’s happening in your state. Management of our oceans and the resources in them is a complicated and fragmented process here in the United States. Food & Water Watch works for U.S. ocean policy that ensures clean water, safe food and prevents corporate control.