Blog Posts: Fish

By Anna Ghosh

Thanks to Michael Pollan’s new book, there’s a lot of buzz right now about Americans’ meals being outsourced, but a connected and equally troubling trend – with even riskier food safety implications – is that Americans’ food is increasingly being imported from countries with abominable track records for food safety. And the country on the top of the list is China. 

This week, Food & Water Watch Assistant Director Patty Lovera testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats to discuss China as the leading producer of many foods Americans eat: apples, tomatoes, peaches, potatoes, garlic, seafood, processed food and food ingredients like xylitol and vitamin C.

Headlines about risky food from China have become all too common – melamine in milk, a chicken for beef swap, toxic juice, exploding watermelons (really, you can’t make this stuff up). Even our pets are threatened. Since 2007, chicken jerky treats imported from China are suspected to have caused more than 600 cases of canine illness and deaths to date.me

In her testimony, Patty explains how combining trade policy with a food safety regulatory system that’s not up to the job of dealing with the rising tide of imports is a recipe for disaster. She warns about the risks involved when cash-strapped agencies turn to third party certifiers (doubly outsourced), and how consumers’ only tool to be able to make informed decisions about where their food comes from – Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) – needs to be improved and expanded.

• Watch Patty’s testimony here (beginning at 00:55:00): http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/hearing/subcommittee-hearing-threat-china%E2%80%99s-unsafe-consumables
• Read Patty’s testimony (complete with charts and graphs) here: http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/china_house_testimony_may_2013.pdf
• Mark A. Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst at The Cornucopia Institute also testified, which you can read more about here: http://www.cornucopia.org/2013/05/not-good-enough-for-pet-food/#more-8370
• Want more background about food imports from China? Read the report A Decade of Dangerous Food Imports from China

When it Comes to GE Seafood, Defend Your Power to Choose

By Rich Bindell

At some point today, you’ll probably make a seemingly mundane choice that you make every day, without even thinking about it. Maybe you’ll choose to drink decaffeinated coffee (to avoid caffeine) or pick a movie for your family to watch this weekend (R-rated movies might not be appropriate for your seven year old). That choice likely involves collecting information before making your decision. But what if some of that information wasn’t available? If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves genetically engineered (GE) salmon as the first GE food animal to enter the marketplace, it will likely be without a label, forcing you to either risk buying a genetically engineered salmon or give up salmon completely. Thanks to the Campaign for GE-Free Seafood, consumers can start to look for stores who promise to not to sell GE salmon.

Food & Water Watch joined forces with Friends of the Earth—and a coalition thirty groups-strong—to kick off the Campaign for GE-Free Seafood. Today, we submitted a letter to the nation’s top grocery stores, asking them to honor an important commitment to their customers: promise not to sell GE seafood and make it their company policy to not knowingly purchase or sell GE seafood. Many stores have already agreed to sign-on to this promise, including Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Marsh Supermarkets, Aldi, and PCC Natural Markets!

The Campaign for GE-Free Seafood coalition includes consumer, food safety, fishing, environmental, sustainable agriculture, parent, public health and animal health and welfare organizations, representing millions of members across the nation who demand that GE salmon be labeled so that consumers can identify it and avoid it. Having a GE label is critical for consumers, especially considering that polls show that 91 percent of them do not want the FDA to approve GE salmon.

The FDA has already said that GE salmon would likely not require labeling, so it could be impossible to tell if the salmon we buy at the market is genetically engineered. Hopefully more stores will join this list and help their customers know what they’re buying. And in the meantime, tell the FDA to reject GE salmon.

By Meredith Moore

A recent blog at Mother Jones asks the question, “Can a fish-sharing program save the oceans?” Since the program in question is catch shares, the answer is, “No.” You’re probably asking the next obvious question: why? Catch shares really do look artificially positive until you look at the whole picture.

Catch shares programs privatize our nation’s fisheries, divvying out the privilege of catching fish to a limited number of individuals, and letting them trade, sell, and lease these rights in unregulated, closed markets. In the process, hundreds to thousands of smaller-scale fishermen are cut out of the industry entirely.

What we end up with is a sharecropper system, which was well-described in a Seattle Weekly feature on one of the halibut and sablefish catch shares programs in the North Pacific. This catch shares program, which has been in place since 1995, has devolved into a system where boat captains compete against each other to offer the latest in at-sea entertainment and luxury to the wealthy owners of those catch shares, just so they can get some fraction of the profits for themselves and their crew. Many of those catch shares owners have never baited a hook in their lives.

Read the full article…

By Tim Schwab

The FDA took a final step toward approving the first genetically engineered animal for your dinner plate. Are you okay with this decision? If not, click on this image.

In September 2010, the FDA appeared primed to approve AquaBounty’s genetically engineered (GE) salmon, the hormone-enhanced fish that, nevertheless, can’t live up to its fast-growth hype. Trumpeting unprecedented transparency, the FDA released to the public hundreds of pages of the agency’s favorable risk assessment, along with an announcement of a days-away public meeting in Rockville, Maryland. The extremely short timeline seemed designed to limit public participation and independent criticisms of the FDA’s scientific work, as few people could drop everything and rush to Maryland.

On the Friday before Christmas 2012, the agency that protects 80 percent of our food supply gave us an encore performance. On a day when few people are at work and many are making plans for extended vacations, the FDA issued its environmental assessment, a 160-page document that basically regurgitates verbatim the agency’s weak 2010 assessment. This moves AquaBounty’s GE salmon within one step of full approval.

The FDA’s risk assessments are noteworthy, not for what they do tell us, but for what they don’t. Instead of scrutinizing the flawed science, limited data, examples of bias and lingering safety concerns that independent scientists have highlighted, the FDA continues to treat its risk assessment as an exercise in churning out the Frankenstein refrain: GE salmon. Safe. Good.

Read the full article…

By Mitch Jones

I recently had a chance to watch the documentary Fish Meat, which explores various ways of farming fish. Fish Navy Films produced the movie and, full-disclosure, they interviewed me earlier this year for their next film, Raising Shrimp.

It is a short film that focuses on production of fish in the Mediterranean and South America, and it highlights many of the concerns we at Food & Water Watch have about farming fish. Farming large carnivorous fish is an inefficient use of smaller fish that have to be harvested in large numbers so they can be turned into fish food. In recent years as much as 90 percent of the catch of these small fish has been used by the aquaculture industry. And we know that soy doesn’t offer much of an alternative.

The film makes clear that open ocean aquaculture is a dirty, unsustainable way to raise fish that not only pollutes local environments, but also puts local fishermen out of work. The filmmakers note that the rise of factory fish farms in Turkey is turning coastal communities that have been fishing communities for centuries (or more) into ecotourism destinations. Ways of life are being displaced and people are losing their livelihood so a dirty form of agribusiness can move into the waters off Turkey’s coast.

It’s not surprising that the filmmakers are more impressed by inland fish farms that raise vegetarian fish. We have long advocated use of land-based Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS), closed systems that reuse virtually all of the water initially put into the system. As a result, RAS can reduce the discharge of waste and the need for antibiotics or chemicals used to combat disease and fish and parasite escapes – all serious concerns associated with OOA and pond aquaculture.

Perhaps the best advice from the film comes only in the closing minutes when the filmmakers present a “What You Can Do” graphic that contains one key element: eat domestic seafood. That’s certainly a recommendation we can get behind.

By Meredith Moore

Social media isn’t always as social as we’d like it to be. We recently noticed a blog by Environmental Defense Fund’s Matt Rand about catch shares. We decided to engage EDF in a brief exchange by posting a response to the blog in the comments section. Unfortunately, it looks like EDF disabled the comments section. Is this a sign that they aren’t open to feedback regarding their position on catch shares?

This is actually typical of the conversation about catch shares in the U.S. Rather than engage with fishermen, time and again we see special interests and regulators tell fishermen how much better off they’ll be under catch shares, and ignore fishermen when they say how much they are suffering. In that sense, catch shares is primarily a one-way street, just like the blog from our friends at EDF. But we have good reason to oppose this fishery management catastrophe. So here’s what we would have posted, had the comments section remained open…

Catch shares are a fishery privatization scheme that promises increased economic efficiency but delivers it at the cost of fishermen’s jobs. These programs are inherently intended to reduce the number of fishermen who can access a public resource. Suggesting they are good for fishing families is laughable. Accumulation limits are a stop-gap measure to limit the extreme consolidation that takes place when catch shares programs are implemented. They are absolutely necessary to have in a catch shares program to protect our fishermen and their communities’ well-being, but a better solution is to retain control of the resource in the public sector and administer it fairly, instead of creating private markets that destroy traditional fishing opportunities.

By Mitch Jones

It seems every few months we get another report about how hard pressed America’s fishermen are. In April I pointed the troubling signs of increased salmon imports in early 2012. Now reports suggest that China is enjoying a robust year in seafood exports. Individual companies as well as regions within China are reporting double-digit percentage increases in exports. This news of increased pressure from China couldn’t come at a worse time for America’s domestic fishing industry.

Earlier this month Acting U.S. Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank declared the Northeast Groundfish Fishery a disaster. On the same day she also declared a commercial fishery failure on Alaska’s Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers and in the Cook Inlet because of low Chinook salmon returns. These actions will allow the federal government to offer millions of dollars of relief to the fishermen in these fisheries. But temporary relief isn’t enough. We need to protect America’s fishermen from fishery management programs that fail to protect fish, while putting independent fishermen out of business.

But while we’re fighting this fight here in Washington and in the regional fisheries across the country, it’s important to watch what you buy. No matter where you shop, look for domestic seafood. If it’s salmon, ask for U.S. wild caught. If it’s catfish or tilapia, ask for U.S. farmed. And when in doubt, you can consult our Smart Seafood Guide.

Why Consumers Should Care About Fishing Quota

By Rich Bindell

We talk all the time about how our food system suffers from mass consolidation. In the meat and poultry industries, just a handful of companies control the majority of the market. Well, the same thing is happening in the seafood industry. In New Bedford, Mass., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit heard oral arguments in a lawsuit challenging federal catch share programs on the East Coast. Depending upon the outcome of this case, it’s either get big or get out for our nation’s fishermen, which should explain why so many of them are outraged about the state of their livelihoods.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, pushes a fishery management program called catch shares, which doles out allocations of fish, giving preference to large-scale fishing operations over smaller ones. This scheme has crushed independent fishermen, as well as the coastal communities they support. Catch shares amount to an all-out attack on America’s fishermen and threaten the existence of fish as a shared public resource.

While often misleadingly touted as the solution to over-fishing, catch shares actually divvy up our nation’s fishery resources for exclusive use by the biggest and fastest fishing operations and then allow corporations and banks to buy and sell these “shares” for profit. This turns the opportunity to go fishing into a commodity. Fishermen have to buy shares before being able to head out for a day’s work catching fish for our tables.

But, don’t take our word for it; just listen to the fishermen. Food & Water Watch produced a video to give some of our nation’s fishermen a chance to express their opinions about catch shares. 

As has happened with family farms on land, the added costs push smaller-scale fishermen out of business and consolidate the industry, paving the way for industrial fishing methods that can destroy sensitive ocean habitats.

Why should consumers care about catch shares? If we don’t, we’ll pay increasingly more for lower quality fish, and we’ll allow large-scale fishing operations to consolidate the seafood industry. In doing so, we’ll put smaller, independent fishing operations out of business.

By Rich Bindell

Magazines devoted to modern gadgetry and technological advances are quick to write stories about science making our lives better. But they often gloss over the unanswered questions that hover over these “life-improving” inventions. DVICE had it right when they said that, “some strange aquaculture is going on,” off the coast of Hawaii. Unfortunately, they seem unaware of just how destructive strange can be when you put a factory fish farm in the middle of the ocean.

DVICE’s August 14 article touting aquaculture didn’t surprise me at all. It’s probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve seen a tech or gadget rag do a misleading story on how aquaculture is going to have a positive affect on seafood production. But articles like this one are so one-sided that it’s easy to mistake them for a press release for the aquaculture industry, and particularly for Kampachi Farms.

While Kampachi Farms’ experiment—called the Velella Project—was admittedly small, confining thousands of fish in pod-like cage is still similar in many respects to the land-based factory farm model, and it’s not exactly sustainable. Factory fish farming requires feed, and a lot of it. This feed is usually made from smaller, wild-caught fish processed into meal and oil, and extensive fishing of these small fish can unbalance the food chain of natural predators that depend upon them. Read the full article…

By Meredith Moore

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released a report last week predicting world aquaculture production to increase 33 percent by 2021, with 89 percent of aquaculture products coming from Asia (61 percent for China alone).

At Food & Water Watch, we have long opposed the expansion of the agricultural factory food model into our oceans. Aquaculture is a dirty, unsustainable model of food production that yields an inferior product for consumers while simultaneously leaving behind an indelible footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. Yet the FAO and our fisheries managers continue to promote aquaculture as if it were a sustainable and effective way to feed the world.

The expansion of aquaculture means more waste, more chemicals, and more antibiotics being dumped directly into our waters to raise fish. It means more imported seafood with residues of unapproved drugs entering the country through our weak food safety system. It means more small bait fish, a key component of a healthy marine ecosystem, will be scooped from the oceans and ground into feed in order to feed these farm-raised fish. It also means the expansion of our already dominant GE soy industry, which genetically modified 93 to 94 percent of its soybeans in 2009 according to Monsanto patents, to create unnatural diets for fish farms.

If the FAO is right, by 2018, half of the fish eaten in the world will be from aquaculture facilities. I know I’ll still be looking for wild, local, and sustainably caught seafood in my grocery store. With all of the risk factors and harmful practices related to factory fish farms, why take the risk?