The Bush Administration is promoting legislation that would allow U.S. federal ocean waters to be leased out for industrial–scale fish farming, also known as offshore aquaculture, open water aquaculture, or open ocean aquaculture. Government officials claim that growing fish in ocean cages would stem the tide of imports and offset a $9.2 billion seafood trade deficit.

“We import over 80 percent of our seafood. Any increase really has to come from aquaculture…[the goal is] just to have our own regional food supply and the security that comes with it,” said Michael Rubino, manager of the Aquaculture Program for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce.² Carlos Gutierrez, the secretary of Commerce, chimed in, as well: “We are already consuming a tremendous amount of farm–raised fish. We might as well do it ourselves under our terms, under our conditions, under our standards, and take the market.’’ ³

However, the claim that an increase in fish production would break the U.S. reliance on foreign seafood is way off the mark because it ignores the reasons why the United States imports such a vast quantity of seafood in the first place. In search of the lowest possible prices, large retailers purchase seafood from around the world. Nearly 20 percent of the seafood available to U.S. consumers comes from China, and close to half is from Asia as a whole.⁴ All the while, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s badly broken import safety program allows contaminated seafood to reach consumers.

Imports of cheap and contaminated seafood have pushed down prices to the point that U.S. seafood sellers now look abroad to sell their products. “It’s getting harder and harder to sell a premium product in America,” said tilapia producer Israel Snir.⁵ In 2006, the United States exported more than 70 percent of its wild–caught and farmed seafood.⁶

Following this pattern, if commercial offshore aquaculture were permitted here, producers would most likely export the majority of their fish, as well. Close to 90 percent of farm–raised tilapia is exported, leaving U.S. consumers to eat tilapia from China and other countries.⁷ Unless the seafood industry changes its trading habits, the development of U.S. offshore aquaculture would have little effect on the volume of seafood imports.

Given that offshore aquaculture is not the solution to our import problem, we should not rush blindly into the development of this risky new industry. Consumers in the United States would be better served by a thoughtful evaluation of the human health, environmental, and socio–economic effects of offshore aquaculture, the ways in which those effects could be prevented or minimized, and whether these known costs are worth the predicted benefits of offshore fish farming.

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