Offshore aquaculture: What does that mean?
December 17th, 2007 by Adina Fleming in Food & Life, News 
The view from inside a Hawaii offshore aquaculture cage
(Photo by NOAA)
The same havoc wreaked by multinational corporations on the way we grow food on land is poised to spread to the seas. Many people realize the harm current agricultural practices have on our health, environment and food quality. Less well-known is the push from the U.S. government to legalize and open public waters to offshore aquaculture, a potentially harmful and financially risky solution to our seafood issues. In a recent report, “Fishy Farms: The Problems with Open Ocean Aquaculture,” nonprofit consumer organization Food & Water Watch examines the government-supported program and its frustratingly widespread pitfalls.
Over the past 20 years, Americans’ affinity for seafood has climbed. Touted by medical experts as full of health benefits, and with more varieties of fish available in supermarkets, American’s seafood consumption has increased by 25 percent.
To satisfy consumer demands for all things fishy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, is trying to maximize seafood production while finding a way to cut our $9.2 billion seafood trade deficit and relieve the heavy stress on our seriously depleted wild marine fish populations. As is his way, President Bush places his faith in human ingenuity and has been pouring money into risky and unproven technologies without re-examining our current processes.
One of the solutions proposed is open water aquaculture, a completely new practice of fish farming that involves growing huge numbers of fish in nets or cages far off the coast. The government has spent more than $25 million supporting four experimental open aquaculture fish farms and funding research into the technologies. Yet despite the funneling of millions of tax dollars and millions more of private investment into the industry, open water aquaculture has failed to show that it is an environmentally sustainable, financially viable, or technically possible practice on a commercial scale.
A crane hoists an offshore fish cage to be submerged 40 feet below the water’s surface.
(Photo Jackie Ricciardi)
All four experimental facilities have been plagued with problems, ranging from shark attacks and mysterious fish deaths to financial troubles to broken equipment. Since they are all receiving government subsidies, there is no way to know if the operations could survive under free-market conditions. Each pound of fish sold by one particular facility costs about $3,000 in U.S. taxpayer dollars to produce.
Then there is the environmental degradation such practices produce, similar to the problems linked to salmon farming, including chemical waste, toxic fish, and the depletion of small wild fish that are made into fish food for farmed fish. There is no way to know what pollutants caged fish are exposed to, or for how long.
Perhaps most importantly, the argument used to support offshore aquaculture is that it can help close the U.S. seafood trade deficit. But there’s reason to believe the practice won’t do much for that deficit at all. The types of fish raised by these experimental operations are high-priced fish for fine dining restaurants and sushi bars. These are not the types of fish the U.S. imports in high numbers. Overlooked as well is that our trade deficit could be reduced if more domestic fish were eaten domestically, as we currently export 71 percent of our production.
So, legalizing open ocean aquaculture may pose serious environmental, technical and economic issues. The government should focus on promoting domestic consumption of domestic fish and work to increase the sustainability of the world’s marine fisheries. In such a new industry, the largely lacking scientific consensus on the potential harm of the practice signals the need for a precautionary approach. As consumers, we should try and be aware of where our fish come from, and what kinds of farming practices we are supporting.
To learn more about the National Offshore Aquaculture Act of 2007, look here.
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