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Fish farming's bounty not without barbs
Rise in aquaculture sparks environmental concern
By Juliet Eilperin
The Washington Post
Updated: 2:26 a.m. ET Jan. 24, 2005
ABOARD THE AQUA LEADER - The harvesters had been hard at work since 8 a.m.
in the evergreen-lined cove off New Brunswick's Lime Kiln Bay.
A humming vacuum hose was sucking silvery 10-pound salmon from their watery
pens -- giant plastic cages measuring 230 feet around with 42-foot-deep
nylon nets underneath -- and depositing the flapping fish onto a metal
slide. There a punch machine rapidly stunned and killed them before workers
slashed their gills to bleed them before dumping them into the hold of the
65-foot-long ship.
In four hours they collected more than 5,000 fish to be transported to a
nearby processing plant and then shipped to Boston restaurants the next day.
Cooke Aquaculture Inc., the Canadian company that raises and processes the
fish in Reserve Cove, is a major player in what has become the next
agricultural revolution: fish farming. The sector's explosive growth is
being hailed by many policymakers and entrepreneurs as a source of jobs and
a way to satisfy the world's growing demand for protein, but
environmentalists warn that aquaculture facilities also threaten to cause
ecological damage by releasing nutrients and domestically bred fish and
chemicals into the seas.
Changing the way we eat
Observers on both sides agree, however, that fish farming could transform
the way Americans eat - and, to some extent, work and live - in the next two
decades, and ultimately replace the last commercial food-gathering system
based on hunting wild animals.
The Bush administration has vowed to quintuple the yield of aquaculture -
the fastest-growing sector of U.S. agriculture, with $1 billion in annual
sales - by 2025. That same year, forecasts say, half the fish consumed
worldwide will be farm-raised instead of wild-caught. The government hopes
that fish farming will erase the country's $8 billion seafood trade deficit:
With $11 billion in imports in 2003, fish is second only to oil among
imported natural resources.
"We have to keep looking for a good supply of healthy seafood for U.S.
citizens," said William Hogarth, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's assistant administrator for fisheries. "Aquaculture is
extremely controversial, there's no question about it. [But] the time has
come for us as a country to have this open dialogue."
The recent push to boost fish farming, which has been practiced for
thousands of years but took off commercially only in the 1980s, is driven by
several factors. The United States and other nations are demanding more
seafood: By 2025, the U.S. market will need 2.2 million tons more seafood
than it now produces. Meanwhile, the total global catch of wild fish has
leveled off at just under 100 million tons.
Many nations, including China, Japan, Norway and Canada, have started
farming fish to meet the burgeoning demand. China leads the world, with as
much as 70 percent of the world's aquaculture production; by comparison, the
4,000 U.S. fish farms produce 1 to 2 percent of the global total.
An end to commercial hunting?
Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association,
compares fish farming to the Neolithic Revolution, in which humans moved
over the course of more than 6,000 years from hunting and gathering to
raising animals and plants domestically.
"People who go fishing are the last commercial market hunters in the world,"
Belle said. "We don't do that anymore on land."
Although many wild stocks are suffering from overfishing, fish farmers say
they can provide a reliable and inexpensive supply of salmon, catfish,
shrimp and other species year-round. New Brunswick-based Cooke Aquaculture
processes 100,000 pounds of fish every day, seven days a week, and can ship
it anywhere in the United States within 24 hours.
"Nobody can get it from the water to the plate like we can," boasted Nell
Halse, the company's spokeswoman.
Farming has also made once-pricey seafood delicacies such as shrimp and
salmon much more affordable: In recent years the cost of raised salmon has
dropped from about $7 per pound to the current all-time low of less than $2,
and salmon farming has brought jobs to once-struggling areas such as New
Brunswick's Charlotte County, where it now employs a quarter of the local
workforce.
But environmentalists say the aquaculture boom is masking problems with the
world's fisheries and wreaking new ecological damage.
Gerry Leape, vice president for marine conservation at the Washington-based
National Environmental Trust, said U.S. officials see that "the oceans are
in crisis, and what's their response? To allow the enormous expansion of
this industry that's proven to have a negative environmental impact."
Cleaning up the mess
Much of the controversy has focused on the fish feces and excess food that
build up beneath the floating net pens and can form bacteria mats on the sea
floor that harm marine life. Many scientists say these problems can be
reversed by rotating the pens and allowing some to lie fallow, and most
growers now use closer monitoring to reduce excess feeding. But salmon waste
off the British Columbia coast still releases as much excess nitrogen as
sewage from a city of 250,000, according to some estimates.
After environmentalists charged that two Maine salmon growers had violated
Clean Water Act requirements, a federal judge ruled in 2003 that the
companies had to leave nearly all their sites fallow for two years after
they harvested their remaining fish. That improved local water quality, but
industry experts say the move hurt the viability of fish farming in the
state.
Many commercial fishermen are more worried about two other factors: the
spread of disease that comes when animals are crowded together and the use
of chemicals to combat these illnesses. In Maine, Canada and elsewhere,
farmed fish have passed sea lice, which eat salmon flesh, to their wild
counterparts. Infectious salmon anemia, a lethal disease first discovered in
Norway in 1984, has spread globally, prompting one Maine fish farm to kill
more than 1.5 million fish in 2002 to try to contain the infection.
Mixing with the real thing
Escaped salmon, which compete for natural resources with other fish and can
sometimes interbreed with their wild counterparts, pose another potential
risk. Fred Whoriskey, who heads the research staff at the Atlantic Salmon
Federation and works on saving the few thousand wild salmon that still live
in North American waters, found more than eight times as many escaped fish
farm salmon as wild salmon in New Brunswick's Magaguadavic River last year.
Mitchell Shapson, a lawyer at the San Francisco-based Institute for
Fisheries Resources who represents wild-catch fishermen, said his clients
resent aquaculture's impact on their hunting grounds.
"If you destroy the environment and you destroy the wild fish, there won't
be anything left to fish," he said.
Fish growers say they have made progress on several fronts: According to
industry officials, the number of escaped Atlantic salmon in British
Columbia dropped from 89,000 in 1998 to 2,500 last year.
"When we do something wrong it comes back to bite us first," said Belle, the
Maine industry spokesman. "It hurts us in our pocketbooks."
The recent debate about health risks associated with farm salmon - one 2004
study published in the journal Science concluded that raised salmon had such
elevated levels of PCBs, dioxin and other cancer-causing contaminants that
consumers should limit themselves to one eight-ounce portion a month - has
also made aquaculture controversial. Industry officials counter that the
health benefits of eating omega-3 rich salmon far outweigh any cancer risks,
and they have conducted recent studies showing PCB levels in farm salmon
that are comparable to those in wild fish.
Environmental fixes in works
Not all aquaculture is environmentally harmful. Farming clams, oysters and
scallops actually reduces nutrient pollution that can deplete the ocean's
oxygen and cause harmful algae blooms, and raising shrimp can be less
environmentally damaging than trawling for them, which can destroy coral
reefs and enmesh other fish. Researchers are experimenting with new, more
expensive techniques on land, and farther offshore, to mitigate fish
farming's impact.
In West Virginia, the Conservation Fund's Freshwater Institute has developed
land-based farms that recirculate water to contain pollution, disease risk
and potential escapers. The plant boasts a massive 40,000-gallon tank that
holds 60,000 rainbow trout, which are collected by a plastic grate once they
are large enough to go to market. Ninety-eight percent of the tank's water
is reused after specialized treatment.
New Brunswick's Cooke and other companies already use recirculated water in
their on-shore hatcheries.
At the other end of the spectrum, Hogarth and other U.S. officials are
pushing to put aquaculture operations farther offshore, on the theory that
tides will disperse nutrients better and submerging pens deeper underwater
will protect them from storms and sea traffic. Initial results from offshore
research facilities are promising: Richard Langan, who directs the
University of New Hampshire's Open Ocean Aquaculture project, said that in
five years the venture has not had a single escaped cod, halibut or haddock
from its three galvanized steel cages positioned six miles off the coast,
and researchers have not detected any adverse environmental impacts.
The administration plans to announce legislation to regulate offshore fish
farms early this year, but advocates such as Ellen Athas, director of the
Clean Oceans program for the Ocean Conservancy, are worried the bill does
not set clear enough standards and rules. "If we don't get a grip on where
things are going, we are going to have an absolute mess out there," she
said.
But for fishing communities such as Eastport, Maine, impoverished by the
decline of Atlantic fisheries, aquaculture offers a tempting solution. The
city was once a thriving shipping center and sardine cannery town, but its
population has dropped by two-thirds in the past 100 years. City Council
member Gary Biss saw some of aquaculture's initial excesses as a company
diver in the 1980s, but he said the industry has improved its record and
deserves public support.
"The world needs the food," Biss said. "There's a crying need for it. It has
to be somewhere. It would be nice if it were here."
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