KNOW YOUR RIGHTS
Blue Pastures in Public Trust The Bush administration has made bringing industrial aquaculture to the ocean a national priority. By Mark Dowie
»THE UNITED STATES currently imports about 75 percent of the seafood Americans eat, adding 7 billion to our trade deficit last year. This is something the Bush administration would very much like to change, and it is the president’s stated goal to reduce the nation’s seafood trade deficit to zero by 2025. Given the country’s growing population and its reliance on stock from the severely overfished waters off America’s coasts, this is no small challenge. One administration solution is to lease vast regions of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) — waters between three and 200 miles offshore — to industrial fish farmers. As they do elsewhere in the world, these high-tech aquaculturalists would suspend huge cages into the cool, calm water beneath the waves and surface currents, known to oceanographers as the pelagic zone. Salmon, cod, amberjack, flounder, halibut, red snapper, 40
Waterkeeper Magazine Spring 2007
threadfin and cobia will be raised in the cages, like cattle in feedlots, fed ground fishmeal robotically from rafts on the surface. When the fish are grown and ready for market their cages will be raised to the surface for harvest. The administration calls this plan Open Ocean Aquaculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a branch of the Department of Commerce (DoC), last year drafted a bill that would create a legal framework for the venture. The National Offshore Aquaculture Act (S.1195), introduced by Senators Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Daniel Inoyue (D-HI) as a courtesy to the administration, cleared the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and died in committee. NOAA has revised the bill and sent it back to OMB. In the meantime President Bush has kept the initiative alive with a 3 million promotional appropriation to NOAA. The
bill is NOAA’s top legislative priority for the current Congressional session. It’s the number five issue at DoC. A battle is brewing between critics of the NOAA plan, who call it “Ocean Ranching” and its supporters who have dubbed it “The Blue Pastures Initiative.” Environmentalists argue that ocean aquaculture is already creating serious ecological challenges with escaped fish (some of them transgenic), parasite and disease transfer from farmed to wild stock, massive sewage discharge and other unsustainable usage of marine resources. Relocating the farms to the open ocean will also remove them from state control and limit public scrutiny. At hearings held before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, serious environmental questions were raised about open ocean aquaculture. Escaped fish are particularly problematic as they are capable of interwww.waterkeeper.org
