Congress Urged to Oppose Open Ocean Aquaculture

PROPOSED FISH FARMING BILL COULD HURT OCEANS, FISHING COMMUNITIES, AND CONSUMERS

A Coalition of Environmental, Fishing, and Consumer Groups Urges Congress to Oppose Open Ocean Aquaculture

WASHINGTON – A proposed bill on open water aquaculture was introduced to the general public today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in a Washington DC briefing. If finalized, the bill would permit millions of fish to be raised in large commercial cages off our nation’s coasts. This could be detrimental to oceans, wild fish, and people, according to a coalition of fishing, environmental, and consumer groups.

“For the past several years, scientists, fishermen and conservation groups have been focused on healthy oceans and the need for strong leadership in developing sustainable marine conservation policies,” said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch. “Unfortunately, NOAA is putting all this at risk by promoting industrial fish farming off our coasts.”

“The Bush Administration has strongly promoted open ocean aquaculture for years and still has not adequately incorporated environmental safeguards or addressed the many problems caused by fish farms in their policy,” said George Kimbrell of the Center for Food Safety. “The NOAA aquaculture bill was a non-starter in the last Congress and it should be rejected by this one as well.”

NOAA’s goal is to grow the U.S. aquaculture industry from $900 million to $6 billion. “The new bill is a minuscule step up from the previous bill, but it still leaves too many specifics to regulators whose purpose is to promote an industry that can dump untreated sewage equivalent to that of 17 million people into our oceans,” said Mitchell Shapson of the Institute for Fisheries Resources.

NOAA expects the majority of industry growth to be from raising carnivorous finfish, like tuna or halibut, which rely on a steady diet including wild fish in some form. Depending on the species, it can take from one to 20 pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed fish. Authors of the recently released Marine Aquaculture Task Force Report have warned that the practice is not environmentally sustainable.

Many questions exist regarding the large-scale release of chemicals, antibiotics, and alternative feeds, and genetically modified organisms into the ocean environment. Commercial fish farms can attract and concentrate parasites and disease, which may then spread to wild fish populations. Salmon farms in British Columbia have been tied to sea lice outbreaks in wild populations. Non-indigenous Atlantic salmon from existing fish farms have been found in the ocean and rivers from the Pacific Northwest to Alaska, which has serious implications for wild stocks.

“Our government’s priority should be ocean and fisheries protection, as pursuant to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, which calls for adherence to the precautionary principle,” said Paula Terrel of the Alaska Marine Conservation Council.

Marianne Cufone, an environmental attorney engaged on aquaculture matters for years observes, “It’s unacceptable that the very agency (NOAA) primarily tasked with managing and protecting our wild fish resources is almost blindly pushing open ocean aquaculture. NOAA’s priority should be to first do no harm to our ocean, fish, and the people and wildlife that rely on them. The new bill mentions some environmental concerns, but most specific safeguards are pushed off to future rule-making. That’s not good enough.”

“Our fisheries are heavily scrutinized and regulated according to rigid national standards, yet NOAA is willing to ease the way for aquaculture with too little regard for the environment, American jobs, or the security of our coastal communities,” agrees Dale Kelley, Executive Director of the Alaska Trollers Association in Juneau.

The Bush Administration’s plan promotes the construction of large-scale fish farms in deep waters from three to 200 miles off the U.S. coast. Among the reasons that the groups object to the plan are that it: lacks substantial environmental provisions, including a prohibition on the farming of genetically engineered fish; lacks consumer protection initiatives; contains weak provisions for protecting traditional fisheries-dependent communities; and ignores regional jurisdiction over the planning, regulation, and monitoring of open ocean fish farms.