Executive Summary

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, is promoting open ocean aquaculture as a way to reduce the country’s $9.2 billion seafood trade deficit and ease pressures on decimated wild marine fish populations. The government has spent more than $25 million supporting four experimental fish farms, as well as research into this technology, which involves growing tens of thousands of fish in cages anchored to the seafloor between three and 200 miles off the U.S. coast. The government wants to open public waters for the potential construction of thousands of these cages.

Despite this substantial financial and political support, open ocean aquaculture has not been shown to be environmentally sustainable, financially viable, or technically possible on a commercial scale. Each of the four taxpayer-supported experimental operations––in Hawaii, New Hampshire, and Puerto Rico––continues to be plagued by problems. Cages and other equipment have broken, fish have died on a large scale, and sharks have threatened workers. At one aquaculture facility, each pound of fish sold costs about $3,000 in U.S. taxpayer money to produce.

The government’s own researchers say open ocean fish farms could cause the same kind of problems linked to near-shore salmon farms, which dump chemical-laden waste directly into the ocean, produce fish that contain PCBs and other toxins, release genetically inferior fish that might mate with wild fish, and use massive amounts of fishmeal made from depleted wild fish stocks.

The U.S. government should not legalize open ocean aquaculture in federal waters, due to serious environmental, technical, and economic questions. Rather, it should promote domestic consumption of domestically produced seafood, work to manage the world’s marine fisheries more sustainably, and limit use of organic certification to closed systems where inputs and outputs can be controlled. In addition, consumers should avoid farm-raised fish sold in stores and restaurants.

The report’s key findings include the following:

• The open ocean aquaculture industry has failed to demonstrate that the practice is environmentally sustainable, financially viable, or technically possible on a commercial scale.
• Each pound of fish sold by the University of New Hampshire’s demonstration project costs about $3,000 in our taxpayer dollars to produce.
• With a total of only about 15 cages, the farms represent a tiny fraction of the thousands of cages the industry and its government backers envision building along U.S. coasts in the coming years.
• Aquaculture will not reduce pressure on wild fish populations. The industry is already the world’s largest user of fishmeal and fish oil, consuming 80 percent of the world’s fish oil and half the fishmeal each year.
• It can take two to six pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of some types of farmed fish.
• Open ocean aquaculture is not a solution to the U.S. seafood trade deficit. The United States exports 71 percent of its domestic seafood production already, including 87 percent of tilapia, 78 percent of tuna, 69 percent of salmon, 25 percent of crabs, and 13 percent of shrimp. Ironically, these all are among the six top seafood imports. Exporting fewer of these varieties would reduce demand on imports and lower the seafood trade deficit.
• Many commercial fisherman already suffering from low-cost imported seafood believe that offshore aquaculture represents another threat to their livelihoods.
• Open ocean aquaculture runs contrary to the letter and spirit of organic food production, which is to produce safe, high-quality foods in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

For footnotes, download the full report, Fishy Farms: The Problems with Open Ocean Aquaculture.

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