Sometimes, in the course of writing this blog, I’ll come
across a number of related issues that all come together at once, and demand a
closer look.
That happened last week, after the
New York Times published an expose of the finfish aquaculture industry,
including a look at the very closely related international reduction fisheries
that provide feed for the aquacultured fish,
debate over the menhaden reduction industry continued, and the
Conservation Law Foundation received a favorable ruling from a federal District
Court judge, who allowed it to continue its lawsuit against Cooke Aquaculture
USA Inc., which the Conservation Law Foundation
alleges committed multiple violations of the federal Clean Water Act while
operating its Maine salmon farms.
All three of those events, at least with respect to net pen
finfish aquaculture in the United States, must be understood in the context of Executive
Order 14276, “Restoring America’s Seafood Competitiveness,” which, in part,
directed
“The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the
Secretary of Health and Human Services and with input from the United States
fishing industry, [to] immediately consider suspending, revising, or rescinding
regulations that overly burden America’s…aquaculture and fish-processing
industries,”
and also directed
“The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the
Secretary of Agriculture, [to] develop an America First Seafood Strategy to
promote production, marketing, sale, and export of United States…aquaculture
products.”
The New York Times article looks at net pen aquaculture
at an international level, examining the product and the industry from the
initial capture and reduction of the forage fish used to feed the aquacultured animals
to the final product delivered to consumers.
Its findings raise real questions about whether the Executive Order’s
support of domestic aquaculture, while at the same time reducing the web of
regulations that govern the industry, is in the best interests of the United
States.
“involved dozens of journalists from as many countries,
mapped more than 1,400 fishmeal plants and identified more than 2,400 ships
connected to fishmeal production. [The
reporters] visited factories and farms; [they] boarded ships at sea. A team of a half-dozen researchers searched
company websites; social media; trade, regulatory, and court records; product
catalogs; and foreign press reports for visible evidence of the industry’s
dangers, which [they] then corroborated with other independent sources.
“What [they] found is that more than 250 seafood companies
have had crimes or concerns documented within their supply chains.”
The article begins with the words,
“Those of us who have recently eaten farm-raised seafood are
participating in a developing environmental crisis,”
then goes on to say,
“That would be bad enough, but the so-called reduction
industry driving the crisis also flouts the law and puts people in danger. The production of fishmeal often involves
forced labor and has led to worker deaths and the polluting of communities
around the world. It has provoked
political unrest in places like India and prompted countries to accuse others
of violating their territorial waters.
Dangerous chemicals, including antimicrobials, fire retardants and
anaesthetics, are often added to fish ponds and make their way into the
seafood...”
The article had to start somewhere, so it began with the
international reduction fleet that catches the fish that are ultimately
processed into the fish meal used to feed the farmed animals. The
“reporters boarded fishmeal ships from the South China Sea to
the far reaches of the North Atlantic. [They]
reviewed logbooks, interviewed workers and documented illegal practices. Hundreds of fishmeal vessels were found to be
fishing in closed or protected seas, violating quotas on certain species, or
fishing without licenses.”
Such findings would seem to justify the rhetoric used by groups such as
The Forage Fish Campaign, which alleges that
“Industrial fishing vessels are stripping billions of pounds of
menhaden, herring, mackerel, shad, and river herring from American coastal waters
every year—collapsing ecosystems, destroying livelihoods, and shipping the
profits overseas.”
But when you actually read the New York Times’ article,
you begin noting something a little different.
The article does list multiple incidents of “industrial fishing vessels…collapsing
ecosystems, destroying livelihoods, and shipping the profits overseas.” It reports that
“Mauritania has been especially attractive because its waters
are unusually rich in marine life, fed by a robust nutrient upwelling that the
Canary Current generates along the coast.
There, Chinese and Turkish ships sweep up bonga shad, sardines, and
round and flat sardinella—species known as forage fish, which are toward the
bottom of the food chain and are eaten by other marine life or seabirds.
“They’re also eaten by humans. Such fish are critical to the food security
of millions of people in West Africa; sardinella, a small fish that provides an
outsize dose of vital nutrients, is among the region’s cheapest and most
important sources of animal protein.
Since the fishmeal industry expanded into West Africa, round sardinella stocks
have fallen to their lowest level ever recorded. Today, three out of those four species are
classified by the United Nations as overexploited.”
The article also reported that
“Thousands of Senegalese fishermen have lost their jobs,
prompting many of them to use their boats to flee the country. Typically, they try to make the nearly 1,000
mile journey from Senegal to Europe’s nearest touch point, Spain’s Canary
Islands.
“One [of the fishermen who fled Senegal] explained to…reporters
how the fishmeal industry played a role in his decision to migrate. ‘We’re fishermen,’ he told them, ‘but there’s
no fish left here.’”
And it notes that
“Policing the fishmeal industry has proved difficult because the
countries in which the feed is produced are typically poor and therefore eager
for foreign investment. In Peru, foreign
companies control the industry through direct plant ownership and dominant
product purchasing power. Some of the
biggest players driving global expansion are Cooke in Canada, which acquired Peru’s
top fishing company inn 2024; Austevoll Seafood in Norway, which owns the major
Peruvian producer Austral Group; and several Chinese companies, which claim the
bulk of Peru’s catch quota for anchoveta, a species of anchovy. As a result, these outside companies wield
undue political leverage when it comes to ignoring rules.”
But one country that is notably absent from
the New York Times’ discussion of the fishmeal industey—either as a malefactor
or as a victim of the reduction fishery—is the United States, and one fish that
never appears anywhere in that article is menhaden, either the
Atlantic or the Gulf species, even though menhaden are the only species in
United States waters typically harvested by the reduction fleet.
And it is that lack of mention that puts both The Forage
Fish Campaign’s comments, and the current debate at the Atlantic Marine
Fisheries Commission over the menhaden reduction fleet, in its proper context.
Yes, in much of the world, and particularly in the southern
hemisphere, the reduction industry that supplies the aquaculture industry with
fishmeal is underregulated, and often ignores what regulations exist. It does disrupt marine ecosystems, destroys
fishermen’s livelihoods, and sends its profits to companies based far from the places
where it does its greatest harm. And if The
Forage Fish Campaign limited its rhetoric to the foreign reduction fishery, it
would be completely in the right.
But the United States’ reduction fishery can’t be compared
to the largely unregulated reduction fisheries that exist elsewhere in the
world. In the Atlantic, where the
hottest debates are currently going on, it is held to strict quotas—which
it doesn’t completely fill—while the menhaden themselves are
neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing, although landings
still ought to be cut by about 40% in order to constrain them to the established
fishery mortality target.
The American menhaden reduction fishery, particularly in the
Atlantic, is sustainable and generally well-regulated, and sets a sustainability
and regulatory standard that the rest of the world’s reduction fisheries should
be trying to emulate.
In the United States, the real threat to coastal ecosystems
comes not from the reduction fishery, but from the net pen aquaculture
operations themselves.
As the New York Times’ article notes,
“At some Norwegian fish farms, a single salmon can eat anywhere
from two to more than five times its weight in wild-caught fish. Altogether, the country’s fish farms produce three
times as much waste in a year as the country’s 5.6 million residents flush down
their toilets, according to a recent report from the Sunstone Institute, a
global data science organization. The
farms’ waste, which consists of salmon feces, rotting carcasses and uneaten
feed, mostly cascades to the coastal seafloor, forming a noxious sludge that
smothers marine life.”
It’s that sort of pollution of Maine’s coastal waters that
led the Conservation Law Foundation to file its lawsuit against Cooke Aquaculture.
In
its complaint, the Foundation alleged that
“Cooke Aquaculture USA, Inc. harms the marine environment by
growing millions of salmon in hundreds of cages along Maine’s coast. Waste from the densely packed salmon forms a
thick layer of toxic sediment on the ocean floor. The salmon foster disease and harbor
parasites, and they escape and interbreed with endangered wild salmon. In addition, Cooke discharges trash into
Maine’s waters.
“Cooke is continuously violating the Clean Water Act at its
13 active Cage Sites and related operations in Maine by adding pollutants,
including but not limited to fish waste, trash, sea lice, diseases, and dead
fish, to waters of the United States, and violating permit requirements related
to monitoring, reporting, and Best Practicable Treatment Standards. [formatting omitted]”
Similar problems have emerged in China, with the New York
Times reporting that
“Through the 1980s and 1990s local [Chinese] governments
converted tidal flats and estuaries into shrimp ponds and marine cages,
building hatcheries, feed mills and export infrastructure. But waste runoff from fish farms became a
major source of pollution, degrading critical waterways, including the Yangtze
River, which supplies much of the freshwater to Shanghai, and the Pearl River
Delta, which supplies Hong Kong.”
Such pollution seems endemic to cage/net pen finfish
aquaculture wherever it occurs and, when combined with the risk of genetic
contamination when farmed fish inevitably escape and breed with native
populations, or the risk of non-native fish escaping and establishing
populations of invasive species that compete with native fish stocks, makes net
pen finfish aquaculture a real threat to the integrity of coastal ecosystems.
However, that doesn’t mean that all aquaculture threatens
native species and their habitats.
The farming of mollusks such as clams, oysters, and mussels
can, for the most part, be done safely in coastal waters, as such animals can
take their food directly from the water itself, filtering out the plankton that
they need to survive. The
only real risks come from the farming of non-native species, which might escape
and colonize an area at the expense of native species—although that risk is
largely discounted by at least some experts—and from the possibility of
importing parasites and/or pathogens if seed oysters or other mollusks, although
of a native species, are imported from a different region.
Even finfish aquaculture can be done safely, if it is done
in land-based facilities.
China probably provides the best example of such land-based fish
farms. As described in the New York
Times’ article,
“China has built its aquaculture industry even in its far
northwest Xinjiang region, the most landlocked part of the planet. Though just a tenth of Xinjiang’s 620,000 square
miles are fit for human habitation, the region now hosts roughly 1,000 fish
farms. These operations, which include farms
in the Taklamakan Desert, China’s largest, produce almost 200,000 tons of seafood
annually: salmon, trout, crayfish, bass, carp, crab, shrimp and tilapia…
“China trumpets its success in this forbidding region—an undeniable
feat. Its state media refers to the
desert fish farms as the ‘blue miracle.’
Xinjiang’s aquaculture is not just about producing fish, a column published
by the state news outlet CGTN boasted in 2025, but also about the nation’s ‘protein
security’ and sustaining harmony between people and nature. ‘From snow fed rivers to desert oases,’ the
column said, ‘Xinjiang has shown that blue dreams can indeed flourish on dry
land.’”
While fish from the Xinjiang farms have been viewed with
some concern, the worries come not from any environmental damage caused by the
farms, but rather because then farms utilize excessive amounts of
antimicrobials and anaesthetics, which could, in theory, create health risks
for the ultimate consumers.
It is even at least possible that properly-regulated net pen
aquaculture can be safely practiced. As
the article observed,
“The United States imports so much seafood in large part because
American aquaculture is subject to significant oversight and regulation to
protect health, safety and the environment.
Federal and state regulations dictate where fish farms can be built and
the allowable levels of water quality, waste discharge, genetic modification
and antibiotic use. These operations end
up paying more than their counterparts abroad for higher-quality water
treatment systems and testing equipment.
Across commonly farmed seafood varieties, including salmon, shrimp, and
tilapia, domestic brands consistently command a steep price premium over
foreign ones—in some cases double the cost.”
Unfortunately, it is exactly those stricter regulations, which
might make net pens a viable aquaculture strategy, that are targeted by
Executive Order 14276, which seeks to bring down the United States’ regulatory
standards to something closer to those prevailing elsewhere, and hopefully
increase domestic aquaculture’s U.S. market share at the cost of degraded
coastal ecosystems.
That the current administration is contemplating such measures,
which would clearly constitute a fool’s bargain, somehow comes as no surprise.
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