Washington Post article discusses the increasing environmental
pressures from a burgeoning fishfarming industry; See (requires free
registration):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2005Jan23.html



washingtonpost.com
Fish Farming's Bounty Isn't Without Barbs
Aquaculture May Change Way U.S. Eats, but Effect on Seas Is a Concern

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 24, 2005; Page A01

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.

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.

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 to 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."

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.

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 salmon, rich in omega-3, 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.

Not all aquaculture is environmentally harmful. Farming clams, oysters
and scallops 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 onshore 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 that 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."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company






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