In response, Washington fined Cooke Aquaculture $332,000 for
its poor maintenance policies. The fine
might be seen as little more than a cost of doing business for Cooke
Aquaculture, a Canadian company which maintains operations in six different
nations and grossed $2.5 billion in revenues last year. However, it will be harder for Cooke to shake
off a
recent law passed by the Washington legislature, which will require all
Atlantic salmon farms to be gone from the state by 2025.
While it
doesn’t appear that the escaped Atlantic salmon will have a negative impact on
stressed—and in some cases endangered—Pacific salmon runs, the possibility
that escaped salmon could spread parasites and disease to native populations
has not been ruled out.
There is reason to worry; fish farms
have often proven to be poor neighbors for native fish, causing habitat
destruction and pollution in addition to disease and parasite concerns.
Thus, I was more than a little surprised last Wednesday when
Bill Shedd, the keynote speaker at the
National Marine Fisheries Service’s 2018 Recreational Fishing Summit,
endorsed open-water fish farms as a way to improve the health of fish stocks
and the quality of saltwater angling.
Now, Mr. Shedd knows about
open-water fish farms. He’s the Chairman of the Board of the
Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, which has “played a leadership role
for over 35 years in developing innovative replenishment solutions,” so
it’s probably not surprising that when he talks about making “a bigger pie”
that can supply a larger user base, he thinks first of farms—and thinks nothing
of serving
as Vice Chairman of an organization, the Center for Sportfishing Policy,
which praised
last summer’s Commerce Department decision to overfish
Gulf of Mexico red snapper and delay their overbuilding by as much as six years.
Overfishing a stock and delaying
its recovery hardly seems to be the logical way to bake a “bigger pie,” but if
you’ve got fish farms…
But then, when you stop to think
about it, fish farms don’t provide any fish to anglers at all—unless you’re
talking about the kind of fish farms that we call “hatcheries,” which pump out
man-made substitutes for naturally-reproduced fish so that anglers can continue to
fish at biologically unsustainable levels.
So exactly how do fish farms help recreational fishermen?
I guess it’s red snapper time
once again…
Unlike the
commercial red snapper fishermen, which haven’t exceeded its annual catch limit
for more than a decade, red
snapper anglers in the Gulf of Mexico regularly exceed their allocation; with
an
assist from the Secretary of Commerce, they caught 212% of their total
allowable catch last year.
Also unlike the commercial
snapper fishermen, Gulf
red snapper anglers seem to find serious problems with any proposed management
measures that might realistically constrain their harvest to or below their
annual catch target.
So it has become pretty clear
that if anglers aren’t staying within their annual catch target and are
unwilling to adopt management measures likely to constrain their harvest, the
only other choice that they have is to try to steal some fish from the
commercial sector.
Thus, the recreational folks
needed a new way to grab some of the commercial landings.
Fish farms might be a way.
The Gulf
of Mexico Fishery Management Council adopted an Aquaculture Fishery Management
Plan in 2009, but didn’t open the
permitting process until January 2016. Up to twenty fish-farming companies would be
issued permits pursuant to the Aquaculture management plan; seven species of
fish, including red drum, mutton snapper, almaco jack, greater amberjack,
dolphin and red snapper would be the most likely fish to be cultivated.
A number of organizations
led by the Center for Food Safety, and including a number of environmental, commercial
and for-hire fishing groups, immediately filed suit in an effort to prevent any
permits from being granted. Their
primary contention was that the Magnuson-Stevens
Fishery Conservation and Management Act, pursuant to which the Aquaculture
Management Plan was adopted, did not in fact give NMFS any authority to regulate
aquaculture; Magnuson-Stevens only governed fishing, and aquaculture wasn’t any
sort of “fishing” at all.
The plain language of
Magnuson-Stevens, which defined “fishing” as
“the catching, taking, or harvesting of
fish; the attempted catching, taking, or harvesting of fish; any other activity
which can reasonably be expected to result in the catching, taking, or
harvesting of fish; or any operations at sea in support of, or in preparation
for, any [of the aforementioned activities] [internal numbering deleted]”
doesn’t appear to apply to
farming activities. While “harvesting”
is mentioned, breeding, growing, feeding,
or any of the other activities normally associated with farming are not.
In addition, since the last
reauthorization of Magnuson-Stevens in 2006, there have been a number of bills
introduced in Congress that were intended to give NMFS authority to regulate
aquaculture, the
most recent of them being the National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Act of
2011, which included among its stated purposes
“To establish a regulatory system for
sustainable offshore aquaculture in the United States exclusive economic zone,”
and
“To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to
determine appropriate locations for, permit, regulate, monitor, and enforce
offshore aquaculture in the exclusive economic zone.”
While not clearly dispositive of
the issue, the fact that Congress was contemplating establishing a regulatory
system for offshore aquaculture, and authorizing the Secretary of
Commerce to oversee such regulation, strongly suggests that neither the system
nor the authority exists today.
But even if NMFS had such
authority, the
complaint in the lawsuit provides other reasons to oppose the offshore fish
farms, and they were reasons likely to catch fishermen’s attention. It alleges that the problems with aquaculture
include
“the escape of confined fish from their
containment; the spread of potentially deadly diseases and parasites from
aquaculture facilities to wild fish and other marine wildlife; the pollution of
ocean ecosystems from the inputs (e.g., drugs, pesticides, fungicides, algaecides)
and outputs (wastes) of industrial aquaculture; the privatization of ocean
resources; threats to marine life and marine ecosystems from aquaculture
systems; market displacement and price competition from cheaply produced farmed
fish; adverse economic effects on fishing businesses; and trickle-down
effects to communities and families that depend on healthy wild fish stocks and
ocean ecosystems for their livelihoods.
[emphasis added]”
Research
done on an experimental fish farm off Puerto Rico seems to have found that some
such concerns were unfounded; open-water aquaculture facilities don’t appear to
change water chemistry, lead to waste build-ups, etc. However, the enclosures used in the fish farms
do seem to serve as fish aggregation devices, pulling in a number of different
species of fish from outside the immediate area.
Assuming that such devices do not also
increase the reproduction of such species, they would have the effect of
aggregating wild fish in an area not accessible to recreational (or commercial)
fishermen and, in so doing, reduce recreational access to fishery
resources.
That would be a strange thing for
recreational fishermen to support, particularly considering all of the
emphasis that recreational fishing groups are placing on “access” these days…
And it’s not entirely clear that
the Puerto Rico research completely addresses some of the other risk
issues. A
2004 paper made available by the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council
notes that
“fish escapements from net cages could
arguably be detrimental to the environment.
Even though these fish are native, endemic to the region and healthy,
many researchers believe that such escapements could compromise the genetic
makeup of the local population of the species.”
Aside from the genetic concerns
raised in that passage, recreational fishermen should note the statement that
the fish in question are “native” to the area—that is, at least the initial
breeding stock, and perhaps later spawners, are removed from the natural
population of fish.
That, again, makes it more
surprising that angling
organizations, which oppose catch share programs, by saying things like
“Putting ownership of a wildlife resource
into the hands of a private business for its own profit is a dramatic departure
from the way this country has traditionally managed wildlife resources”
seem to have no problem when fish
farmers obtain their broodstock from the public resources that swim in the open
sea.
But maybe everything else is
worth it to them if they can just hurt the commercial fishery by undercutting
its sales with cheap, factory-farmed fish, and maybe put commercial fishermen
out of business. They can use the farms as one big
finagle; with the commercial fishery crippled, they could take over its unused
quota.
It’s hard to think of any other
reason that members of the angling community would support private farming
activities that are based on wild broodstock removed from a public resource.
It’s hard to think of another
reason why anglers might support an industrial fish production process, that
ties up large areas of ocean where access is denied to anglers, a process that attracts
fish from still-public waters and aggregates them around inaccessible pens, where
they’re at risk from any diseases or parasite infestations that spring up in
the crowded factory farms—or, even if the farms are pestilence-free, are at
risk of genetic pollution from farm escapees.
But it’s easy to think of a safer
alternative to industrial fish farms, a risk-averse path to Mr. Shedd’s bigger
pie.
It’s called conservation.
It’s a lot less expensive than
industrial fish farms. It doesn’t wall
off acres of water, breed disease, or cause genetic dilution.
But it does take patience. It takes responsibility. It takes anglers willing to put aside the destructive,
childish demands for instant gratification, the sort of demands that led to the
Gulf red snapper reopening last spring, and replace them with a more mature
view that can conceive of the greater, long term good for both the fish and the
fisherman—recreational and commercial—that conservation can bring.
Conservation is not as high-tech
as a fish farm. It takes a bit
longer. But it produces a big and
nourishing pie, without the use of any artificial ingredients at all.
And that’s a good thing, for in building
a bigger fish “pie,” organic is the right way to go.
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