Water fight looming in US Senate
As Julia Hollister reports, bipartisan support for expanding US aquaculture does not mean it will get an easy ride.
There is a storm brewing across the USA. But don’t board up your windows, stock up on canned foods or check your home insurance.
The storm concerns the arguments over how America can close the gap between the seafood it consumes and what it produces – and the advocates and critics of aquaculture are at odds over the issue.
So, is support for aquaculture a bipartisan issue or will it be another politically contested question?
A set of agribusiness giants and other corporate interests are pushing to expand industrial finfish aquaculture into US federal waters – the open seas – where proponents argue that it will help feed a growing global demand for seafood and have less environmental impact. They want Congress to pass legislation establishing a federal aquaculture system.
Stronger America Through Seafood (SATS), an industry group that includes large players such as Cargill, Merck Animal Health and Sysco, argues there is now widespread support from academics, environmentalists, seafood experts, and Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, for the idea that America’s offshore aquaculture industry needs to grow.
Representative Kat Cammack (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
To achieve this, SATS says its focus is to secure passage of the bipartisan Advancing the Quality and Understanding of American Aquaculture (AQUAA) Act.
So far, industrial-scale aquaculture has been limited to coastal or inland waters, but now there’s a push to expand it into the open seas. There, proponents say, it can help feed a growing global demand for seafood with less environmental impact than coastal aquaculture, being farther from sensitive coastal habitats and creating less concentrated pollution in deeper, higher-flow waters.
In 2020, then President Donald Trump issued an executive order that gave the industry a boost, and government agencies have begun the permitting process for several projects in which finfish would be raised in open-ocean pens miles out to sea.
In June 2023, the bill setting out the AQUAA Act was reintroduced to both the US Senate and House. It seeks to establish regulatory standards and investment in research and technology for an industrial aquaculture system in federal waters.
The Co-Chairs of the Aquaculture Caucus, Republican Congresswoman Kat Cammack and Democrat Ed Case introduced the bill. Representative Cammack said: “Aquaculture should be one of our priorities as we grow our focus on food security. In Florida, we’ve seen the benefits of aquaculture firsthand – breeding, raising, and harvesting shellfish, fish, and aquatic plants in our waters. We’ve demonstrated that it’s possible to provide healthy, fresh food that’s produced sustainably at home to support our growing population.”
Despite its bipartisan support, however, the bill has yet to make it out of the committee stage in either the Senate or the House of Representatives.
Tyler Sclodnick
Tech solutions
Tyler Sclodnick is a scientist with Innovasea, a company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, with operations across the US, including in Louisiana, Maine, and Washington. Innovasea provides aquaculture solutions ranging from submersible cages and feeding systems to land-based facilities and environmental consulting.
“Research and development in the last few decades have positioned aquaculture as a sustainable form of protein production,” Sclodnick says. “Today, with computer modelling, artificial intelligence (AI), sensors, and camera systems, aquaculture farms are more sustainable than ever before.”
Innovasea is committed to sustainability, and its technology is helping farmers optimise performance to benefit the farmer’s bottom line and the environment, ensuring good water quality and healthy fish. The company offers a wide array of technologies for different problems and farm environments.
Sclodnick explains: “We are actively innovating in several areas, but I want to focus on our Open Ocean Aquaculture solutions to highlight some exciting new technology.
“Precision aquaculture is a fully integrated system that’s helping revolutionise open ocean aquaculture. Innovasea offers sophisticated sensors and high-resolution cameras that provide real-time visibility into feeding so that farmers can improve their efficiency and optimize growth. High-quality feeds are an expensive cost for farmers. Our feed cameras support AI capabilities so farmers can optimize the feeding protocols for their fish, reducing waste and boosting their profits.
“Innovasea is building on water temperature and dissolved oxygen data from sensors to create deeper insights into fish growth. We are using this data to forecast temperature stress or hypoxia events before they start to stress fish. With our communications systems, farmers have an accurate inventory of fish stocks underwater and can conduct fish growth modelling in real time”
US supermarket – Could the AQUAA Act put more US seafood on the shelves?
The case against
There are, however, lobby groups opposing a growth in aquaculture for the US.
Environmental advocates, including the campaign group Don’t Cage Our Oceans (DCOO), are fighting against the proposed congressional bills, calling for a reversal of the executive order and a stop to the proposed projects in US federal waters.
While some aquaculture has social and environmental benefits, providing a secure source of protein that has a much lower carbon footprint than most livestock alternatives, farming carnivorous finfish on an industrial scale has numerous potential negative impacts. These can include, according to critics: chemical and nutrient pollution, overfishing of forage fish to feed penned fish, threats to indigenous and small-scale fisher livelihoods if wild stocks are affected by infections spreading from farmed fish.
Government agencies have avoided stepping too deeply into the controversy. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the California Fish and Wildlife told Fish Farmer: “We do not respond on pending legislation.”
Earlier this year, Cooke Seafood abandoned plans to win back leases at its two Washington state steelhead trout farms in the US, blaming delays by the state’s administration which it says make the case futile.
Salmon in US market
The group’s subsidiary, Aquaculture Pacific, has filed a motion with the Superior Court of the State of Washington to dismiss its appeal against the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, which has ordered the shutdown of Cooke’s farms. These were the last remaining net-pen fish farms in America’s Pacific northwest.
Cooke said: “As a result of the Department of National Resources arbitrary decision, over 100 Washington fish farming professionals including farm managers, veterinarians, hatchery technicians, truck drivers, processing plant workers and vessel crew have since been forced out of their jobs by the baseless closure of locally established fish farms.”
It is clear that a bipartisan approach at the federal level does not amount to a broader political consensus either for or against fish farming at sea. Expect more storms over this issue in the years to come.
Find out more
Stronger America Through Seafood www.strongerthroughseafood.org/advocacy
AQUAA Act https://cammack.house.gov/media/press-releases/reps-cammack-case-introduce-aquaa-act-support-domestic-aquaculture
