Excerpt from the executive summary:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, is 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.

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. Each of the four taxpayer-supported experimental operations––in Hawaii, New Hampshire, and Puerto Rico––continues to be plagued by problems. Cages and other equipment have broken, fish have died on a large scale, and sharks have threatened workers. At one aquaculture facility, each pound of fish sold costs about $3,000 in U.S. taxpayer money to produce.

The government’s own researchers say 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.

The U.S. government should not legalize open ocean aquaculture in federal waters, due to serious environmental, technical, and economic questions. Rather, it should promote domestic consumption of domestically produced seafood, work to manage the world’s marine fisheries more sustainably, and limit use of organic certification to closed systems where inputs and outputs can be controlled. In addition, consumers should avoid farm-raised fish sold in stores and restaurants.