FISH FARMS UNDER FIRE

 

It wasn’t long ago that aquaculture—fish farming—was widely viewed as a benign activity that promised to feed people while freeing wild fish stocks from the stresses caused by commercial fishing.  Analogies were drawn between the evolution of hunter/gatherer societies into more advanced agricultural communities, as many predicted that the eventual prohibitions of market hunting and the commercialization of most freshwater fish species would logically and inevitably lead to prohibitions on commercial fishing for marine fish species, too.

But somewhere along the way, harsh realities intervened, and—at least to some people—fish farming no longer seems to be the panacea that it once appeared.  As noted in an article released by the Associated Press,

“as [aquaculture] has grown, the problems associated with large-scale farming have grown with it…The farms and the waste from them can degrade and pollute nearby ecosystems, diseases can quickly sweep through the tightly packed fish, and gathering the feed for the animals can cause distant environmental problems.”

One critic argued that

“Approximately 20% of the global catch of wild fish goes toward making fishmeal, and much of it is directed to feed farmed aquatic animals.  This demand has intensified over the years, creating a troubling feedback loop where the aquaculture industry depletes wild fish stocks to sustain itself.  The depletion of smaller forage fish is particularly concerning, as these fish play an essential role in marine ecosystems, supporting larger species, including wild fish, marine mammals, and seabirds.”

The Conservation Law Foundation, an advocacy group that focuses on conservation issues in the New England region, noted that

“up to hundreds of thousands of fish crowd each floating pen.  The fish eat and grow at astounding rates—and defecate.  A typical industrial farm of several hundred thousand fish produces around one million pounds of waste annually.  That’s roughly the same amount of waste generated by Maine’s largest city, Portland, in a year.

“…[The waste] is not captured or treated.  Instead, it floats out through the pens to pile up on the ocean floor.  The waste accumulates over time to form a layer of foul-smelling black sludge that is toxic to small bottom-dwelling creatures.  Eventually, the seafloor around an industrial salmon farm will transform into a lifeless landscape.

“Fish also produce a lot of nitrogen waste.  Nitrogen pollution mixed with warm water creates perfect conditions for toxic algae outbreaks…Nitrogen pollution also clouds the water, blocking eelgrass nurseries on the seafloor from essential sunlight.”

The Conservation Law Foundation also noted the threat that farmed fish can pose to their wild counterparts.

“Contagious diseases quickly spread through the penned fish.  The salmon industry uses antibiotics to prevent disease, but that increases the risk of antibiotic resistance in humans who consume the farmed fish.

“…[S]mall crustaceans, known as sea lice, cling to salmon and eat their skin.  In natural conditions, sea lice parasites attach in small numbers, making them a minor issue that doesn’t affect a fish’s health.  But in industrial salmon farms, they spread easily between captive fish…To control sea lice, the salmon industry has historically used chemical treatments and pesticides—including some that kill crustaceans like lobsters.

“Disease outbreaks and sea lice infestations at industrial salmon farms also threaten nearby endangered wild salmon and fish species that are key to fishermen.  Viruses and sea lice larvae travel through the water from captive fish to wild fish.  Escaped farmed fish…can also transmit disease and parasites.”

After one or more seals damaged net pens that Cooke Aquaculture had installed in the waters off Cutler, Maine two years ago, allowing 50,000 juvenile salmon to escape into the state’s coastal waters, groups such as the Atlantic Salmon Federation expressed concern that the escaped fish could interbreed with endangered, wild salmon, and thus lower the wild fish’s chances of survival.

The National Marine Fisheries Service acknowledges such concerns, but claims that such threats are receding while also providing the reassuring comment that

“Marine aquaculture in the United States operates within one of the most comprehensive regulatory environments in the world.  Farms sited in U.S. waters must meet a suite of federal, state, and local regulations that safeguard environmental health, water quality, food safety, and public health.”

Even so, public sentiment seems to be swinging against fish farms, not only in the United States, but elsewhere in the Americas.

The current antipathy toward fish farms probably had its roots in the 2017 failure at another net pen facility, also owned by Cooke Aquaculture, in the State of Washington, which allowed about 250,000 Atlantic salmon to escape into Washington waters.  Cooke blamed the event on unusually strong tides, but state officials disagreed, finding that the pen had survived similar tides in the past.  Instead, Washington blamed the escape on Cooke’s failure to properly maintain the pen, finding that the company allowed excessive marine growth to build up on the pen, to the point that the aggregate weight of the fouling built up on the pen was six times the weight of the pen itself, and caused the pen to collapse.

The State of Washington, as well as many of its residents, including coastal tribes with long traditions of salmon fishing, were outraged by the escape and Cooke’s alleged negligence, fearing that the escaped Atlantic salmon might survive and compete with already threatened runs of native Pacific salmon.  As a result, in 2018, Washinton legislators passed a ban on farming Atlantic salmon in state waters.

In 2022, Washington informed Cooke that it would not renew the company’s leases, which allow it to establish aquaculture facilities in state waters.  The state alleged that Cooke had violated the terms of the leases, and that it had

“determined that allowing Cooke to continue operations posed risks of environmental harm to state-owned aquatic lands resulting from lack of adherence to lease provisions and increased costs to [the Washington Department of Natural Resources] associated with contract compliance, monitoring, and enforcement.”

Early last January, Washington took the last logical step, issuing regulations that banned all net-pen fish farms, regardless of the species involved, in waters leased by the state.

That ban is being challenged by the fish farmers, in the form of a group calling itself the Northwest Aquaculture Alliance, which claims that the rulemaking process leading to the ban was invalid, because its outcome was predetermined.  It’s never easy to predict what a court might decide, and it is possible that the Aquaculture Alliance could prevail, but it’s probably safe to say that in the State of Washington, aquaculture proponents, like salmon returning to spawn, will have to swim against some very strong currents if they expect to achieve their goals.

Farther north, 2024 saw the adoption of a new rule that would ban net pen fish farms in the Canadian province of British Columbia.  Canadian Fisheries and Oceans Minister Diane Lebouthillier announced that the farms must be shut down by 2029.  While they may continue operations until then, the farms' sea lice management measures will be more closely controlled, they will face stricter reporting requirements, and their interactions with marine mammals will be more closely monitored.

Things aren’t too much different far to the south where, by a unanimous vote of its legislature, the Argentinian province of Tierra del Fuego banned net-pen salmon farms in 2021.  According to the website Patagonia Works, which reported on the ban,

“Consequences of salmon farming include massive salmon mortalities, intensification of toxic algae blooms (such as red tide), introduction of exotic species, the loss of local fauna, generation of dead zones, entanglement of marine mammals and bacterial resistance [to antibiotics].  According to a Just Economics report, the salmon industry seeks to grow fivefold over the next 10 years, threatening the waters of the Beagle Channel.”

Such growth, and the threats to the marine ecosystem that it would create, was unacceptable to the residents of Tierra del Fuego, who sought and received the political support to shut down the net pen farms.

Even in Chile, Argentina’s neighbor and one of the world’s biggest producers of net pen-farmed salmon, people are beginning to question the practice. 

About one year ago, the New York Times has reported,

“a report from the United Nations called salmon farming ‘one of the main threats to the environment’ in Patagonia.  David R. Boyd, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, who prepared the U.N. report, recommended suspending ‘the expansion of salmon aquaculture pending independent scientific analysis of adverse environmental impacts’—a call that the industry rejected.”

The Times also reported that

“Arturo Clement, the president of the industry association, SalmonChile, acknowledged that, in the past, the sector had ‘made mistakes and we still have much room for improvement…We are convinced that it is possible to make environmental care compatible with economic development.”

Others are not as certain.  They point to the same issues identified elsewhere—antibiotic use, pollution from fish waste creating hypoxic “dead zones” and harmful algae blooms—as threatening Chile’s marine environment.  The Times described Tarsicio Antezana, a retired oceanographer who lives on an island off the coast of southern Chile, seeing

“heaps of garbage and fish waste abandoned by salmon companies…when they leave.  The trash sits on shorelines for months, and in some cases, he said that only outrage from local residents forced the companies to clean up.”

The fish farms are now moving into an area in southernmost Chile, a Patagonian region known as the Magallenes, which is still largely wilderness.  Fish farm opponents argue that increasing the farm’s presence in the Magallenes will have a “catastrophic” impact on the Magallenes ecosystems, which collectively house about one-third of the Earth’s marine biodiversity.  The Times noted that

“Leticia Caro, a member of the Indigenous Kawesqar community, said she has already seen devastating effects of the salmon industry on her people’s ancestral territory in the Magallanes.  She described seafloor contamination, the loss of native fish species her community relies on for food and the dumping of industrial waste in Kawesqar fishing areas.”

Yet, while there are many voices in Chile that oppose expanding the farms, there are also many who seek the economic benefits that the farms provide.  Thus, while the Chilean farms are under fire from some quarters, it is not clear whether the government will take any action to significantly curb their activities.

The global opposition to fish farms has generally focused on salmon net pens sited in cold-water environments.  Land-based production is generally considered a viable, ecosystem-friendly alternative to the open water farms.  Thus, the newest challenge to fish farming might be something of a surprise.

In Maryland—hardly traditional salmon country—the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is seeking judicial review of a permit that would allow a proposed land-based salmon farm to discharge as much as 1.9 million gallons of water per day into the Susquehanna River, the largest and arguably most important tributary of the Chesapeake Bay.

The Foundation’s concerns stem from the fact that AquaCon, the proposed plant’s operator, plans to build the farm just five miles above the Susquehanna Flats, an important spawning area for striped bass and other species such as American shad, hickory shad, alewife, and blueback herring.  The Foundation fears that, just as in the case of net pens, the land-based farm’s discharge water would contain too much waste matter, could promote algae blooms and resulting hypoxic “dead zones,” and so cause substantial harm to the flats’ submerged aquatic vegetation as well as to the many fish that gather on the flats to spawn.

The publication National Fisherman quoted Paul Small, the Foundation’s vice president for litigation, who observed that

“Land-based salmon farms are relatively new and unpredictable.  Knowing the prior failure of these types of plants, and that the Susquehanna River is already overloaded with nutrient pollution, [the] permit must protect against these risks.”

The publication noted that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is not seeking to prevent the AquaCon plant from ever operating.  Instead,

“CBF will be working to ensure [the] permit is strengthened to adequately consider the imminent threats to the Susquehanna Flats and nearby aquatic habitats.”

Open-water fish farms have, in the past, done significant harm to the waters where they were cited.  As land-based farms are proposed as alternatives, it only makes sense to ensure that they are properly regulated before they begin operations, so that both the farm and the surrounding environment can thrive.

Yet not everyone believes that fish farming ought to be thoroughly regulated.

On April 17, President Donald Trump issued an executive order intended to support the growth of aquaculture in the United States, which requires that the Secretary of Commerce,

“in consultation with the Secretary of Health and Human Services and with input from the United States fishing industry, shall immediately consider suspending, revising, or rescinding regulations that overly burden America’s commercial fishing, aquaculture, and fish processing industries…”

and

“in consultation with the Secretary of Agriculture, shall develop and implement an America First Seafood Strategy to promote production, marketing, sale, and export of United States fishery and aquaculture products and strengthen domestic processing capacity…”

During Trump’s first term, he also made efforts to promote fish farming.  In support of those efforts, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a nationwide aquaculture permit in 2020, which would have opened the door to open-water fish farms for various species, first in the Gulf of Mexico, and then elsewhere along the United States’ coasts.  But on March 17, a judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against the issuance of such permit.

The lawsuit, brought by the Center for Food Safety and a group of environmental organizations, argued that the Corps’ permit failed to properly address fish farms’ environmental threats.  The federal district judge, Kymberly K. Evanston, issued an initial ruling last fall which criticized the Corps for not acknowledging the harm that fish farms cause the environment.  Her March ruling vacated the permit altogether.

The court’s decision points out the difficulties that the administration faces in its efforts to promote fish farming.  Earlier court decisions, in 2018 and 2020, also ruled against offshore aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico.  In another instance, the federal government provided some funding for a pilot fish farming project that would have been located about 45 miles off Florida’s Gulf Coast.  However, public opinion was so strongly set against the project—regulators received almost 45,000 comments opposing it—that it was eventually cancelled.

Paul Zajicek, executive director of the National Aquaculture Association, believes that the opposition is misplaced, and that would-be fish farmers are unreasonably burdened by

“a permitting system that is too lengthy, too costly, and too subject to legal challenges from groups opposed to commercial aquaculture.”

Given the recent court decision, he believes that companies may now be required to seek permits on an individual project-by-project basis, instead of relying on permits that cover a broad expanse of federal waters.  Such an approach is likely to add time and effort to the permitting process.

But Marianne Cufone, executive director of the Recirculating Farms Coalition, sees no problem with that.

“Florida is not Maine.  California is not Texas.  And in just the Gulf of Mexico, there are significantly different habitats [and] different fish species that could be affected…

“Claiming one size fits all doesn’t seem realistic, and the court agreed.  Now they can’t use one big permit to speed these things through.”

Despite the recent setbacks, fish farming is not a dead issue in the United States.  There are many in the industry who want to see it not only continue, but also expand.

But the rapid growth of aquaculture promoted in Trump’s executive order is unlikely to occur.  Even if regulations governing aquaculture are relaxed—and, in fact, aquaculture isn’t actually regulated by NMFS or by any other federal agency, although some, like the Army Corps of Engineers, might have regulatory authority over some aspects of aquaculture operations—public opposition to such a private appropriation and likely degradation of the nation’s public waterways ensures that any proposed fish farms receive thorough review, to make sure that such projects meet all biological and legal standards.

Given the past problems that fish farms have caused, both in the United States and elsewhere, the public is right to insist that no more be built until all of the public’s concerns are addressed.