The Future of Fish Farming
The Bush administration is right to push aquaculture, but it needs to push the right kind of aquaculture.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

IN THE NEXT few months, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will finalize a 10-year plan for encouraging American aquaculture, or fish farming. The draft plan expands on a bill the administration unveiled last year to jump-start fish farming offshore. How this initiative takes place will have big economic and environmental implications. Done right, aquaculture can be part of the solution for oceans and fisheries under great stress. Done badly, it could make matters a lot worse.

Fish is the one major component of the American diet that is still mostly hunted, not farmed. American seafood consumption is growing, and much of the growth involves farmed fish from countries with terribly lax environmental standards. With many fisheries collapsing and others dwindling, development of responsible domestic aquaculture stands to relieve stressed wild species even as it reduces U.S. imports of unsustainably farmed seafood. What's more, certain types of aquaculture -- particularly the harvesting of mollusks -- can actively aid water systems that benefit from the filtration they provide. The administration's instinct to create a regulatory framework for offshore fish farming, an idea pushed in the landmark 2004 report of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, is a sound one.

But fish farming poses serious environmental problems of its own. In many fish farms, water flows freely in and out of enclosures in which huge numbers of fish are raised; fish feces and excess food end up polluting area waters. The feed for fish is often made of other fish that still have to be hunted -- and it can sometimes take several pounds of extracted fish to produce a single pound of edible farmed fish. Escapes from fish farms can lead to competition between farmed species and local species. And farmed fish can concentrate diseases and parasites that then transfer to wild fish.

The administration's plan -- and its bill -- seem more focused on establishing the regulatory regime that will govern offshore farming than on determining what the substantive rules of that regime will be. That's unfortunate. Unless it's clear how these and other environmental concerns will be handled, it's impossible to know whether, in practice, an expanded domestic aquaculture industry will harm or help struggling marine ecosystems. The environmental standards for fish farming ought to be laid out clearly in the same laws and policies that aim to foster this industry. A recent draft revision of the bill by the NOAA Aquaculture Program, if the administration adopts it, would represent a significant step in the right direction. Aquaculture offers an excellent opportunity to move away from hunting on the seas. That move, however, should not be allowed to introduce its own set of destructive practices.