Opinion
Something’s fishy about farming the seas
Legislation to authorize fish farming in offshore waters raises ecological and economic questions
By Diana DeFazio
Fish farming is a complicated issue, but it’s time for us to do our homework. A proposed bill in Congress seeks to allow fish farming in U.S. federal waters from 3-200 miles offshore. We must ask and answer some fundamental questions. What does it mean to privatize the ocean commons? How would an expansion of fish farming in the United States affect wild fish markets and the people who depend on fishing for their livelihoods? How might industrial scale fish farming affect the ocean ecosystem and those who depend on it for subsistence? Most importantly, do we want to farm the seas?
Imagine the U.S. government granting private corporations the exclusive use of a tract of ocean “real estate” to raise large numbers of fish in intensive confinement in submerged or floating sea cages. This is precisely the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) vision for the future of the U.S. seafood industry.
At recent public meetings in Juneau, Anchorage and Kodiak, NOAA representatives tried to sell Alaskans on the idea of fish farming in the open ocean, pitching the expansion of fish farms to U.S. offshore waters as the only way to reduce our reliance on seafood imports and meet rising domestic demand.
Private industry and government are eager to set up a regulatory framework to enable commercial fish farming operations offshore. That’s why they need the National Offshore Aquaculture Act. The proposed bill is expected to be introduced in Congress within the next month or two.
Among NOAA’s many claims is that offshore aquaculture will increase jobs and provide opportunities for year-round employment in coastal communities. It is difficult to imagine what kinds of jobs NOAA has in mind, since, in order to compete with farmed fish from other countries where labor is cheaper, the U.S. would have to farm using more automation technology and less labor. And, the idea that an Alaskan fisherman would rather work year-round in a sterile lab injecting fish with antibiotics than make a year’s income working seasonally fishing from his small boat fails to recognize that coastal Alaskans value their independent way of life.
It is no secret that the engineering investment required for an offshore fish farming operation is well beyond the reach of small scale fishermen or other small business entrepreneurs. It is likely that the key players and beneficiaries will be large multinational corporations. Alaskan citizens and the marine environment will pay for the consequences.
Offshore aquaculture proponents would have us believe that the environmental risks of farming offshore are less than those of coastal fish farms, but there is no evidence that this is true. Existing experimental offshore facilities off the coasts of Hawaii and New Hampshire and in the Gulf of Mexico are of a much smaller scale than proposed commercial farming operations, and there is concern that they do not accurately reflect the environmental risks inherent in farming large tracts of the ocean. Potentially harmful impacts include transference of disease to wild fish, contamination from feed and feces, and escapes of farmed fish into the wild fish population.
It’s probable that Alaskans will say no to fish farming in federal waters offshore. After all, we banned finfish farming in State waters in 1990 and we are proud of our wild fish tradition. But if the nation as a whole says “yes,” and the offshore aquaculture bill passes, it will have dramatic consequences for Alaska, likely driving the prices of wild fish down even further or alternately creating such a niche market for wild fish that not even Alaskans could afford it.
Fish farming does hold promise. It promises to privatize the ocean commons; it promises to put fishermen out of business or reduce them to automatons and it promises to complete our reliance on industrially produced food. There’s no doubt that fish farming is big business, and that the U.S. has fallen behind in this expanding industry, but maybe that’s a good thing.