The Farmer Goes to Sea

Overfishing isn´t just a Hawaiian problem, and it is not a relic of the past. In a 2001 report to Congress, the National Marine Fisheries Service could say with certainty only that 22 percent of fisheries in U.S. waters were in good shape. Because of commercial fishing, three quarters of fishery stocks worldwide are either on the verge of depletion or have already been pushed over the edge, according to the United Na- tions Food and Agriculture Organization. Even worse, after a decade of crunching numbers from every major fishery from pole to pole, in 2003 biologists at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia published a study in the journal Nature showing that 90 percent of all large predatory fish in the global ocean-including shark, tuna, cod, marlin and grouper-had been wiped out. â€Their depletion not only threatens the future of these fish and the fishers that depend on them,†warned Boris Worm, co-author of the article, â€it could also bring about a complete re-organization of ocean ecosystems, with unknown global consequences.â€

I caught a glimpse of this looming catastrophe nearly a decade ago, while interviewing fishermen on Barang Lompo, a small island in central Indonesia. A man in his mid-30s recalled a time when catching dinner was simple. When his wife started boiling water for rice, he paddled his dugout canoe just offshore, caught his fish, and returned just before the rice was ready to eat. But then the foreign commercial trawlers came, and everything changed. At the time of my visit, the man said, it took him several hours to catch enough fish for a single meal.

Open-ocean aquaculture itself won´t replenish the world´s wild fish populations. And it´s unlikely that the types of large predatory fish that have become so scarce will ever be raised in house-size nets like the SeaStation. But farmed fish, argue Allocca and other OOA proponents, can take the pressure off wild populations-and give consumers the types of fish they want, for a reasonable price.

â€It´s simple,†Allocca tells me after we´re back onboard the Ho´Okupu, scooping half a ton of fish food into two hoppers that mix the pellets with seawater and carry the slurry down tubes and into the cages below. â€People want to eat fish. And the fish have to come from somewhere.†He nods down toward the nets and adds emphatically, â€This is where you´re gonna get ´em.â€

In 1999 the state of Hawaii granted Cates International permits to set up operation in state waters, and the company became the first private OOA outfit to start production in the U.S. Randy Cates currently sells 8,000 pounds of moi a week, but with plans in the works for a total of 16 cages and a new hatchery already going up, he expects to be selling four million pounds of the fish annually within two years-more than the total caught in Hawaii over the past half-century.

Cates was the first, but others are rushing to catch up. Snapperfarm Inc. in Puerto Rico raises cobia and sells it-still in small quantities-to restaurants in Miami and New York. There´s another fledgling farm in the Bahamas, and off the Big Island of Hawaii, a company called Kona Blue is raising sushi-quality yellowtail in SeaStation cages.

The U.S. now leads the world in designing and building cages for OOA, but that doesn´t mean the industry´s future in this country is guaranteed. â€We are light-years behind the rest of the world in all other aspects of fish farming,†maintains Cates, citing basic biological research on promising species, development of more-efficient hatchery technologies and a political consensus to develop a globally competitive fish-farming industry.

SeaStation inventor Gary Loverich is similarly rankled. Since selling his first two cages to a company in the Philippines in 1996, he says, about half of the 35 giant cages built have ended up in foreign waters. The list of countries experimenting with OOA includes Australia, Chile, China, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Russia and Spain. â€And in the U.S.,†says Loverich, frustrated, â€we are still debating whether or not fish farming should be allowed.â€

Part of the disparity is cultural, says Net Systems´s Langley Gace. â€Aquaculture is relatively new for most Americans. But it´s been a part of Asian life for thousands of years.†Market forces also account for some of the difference, he adds. A typical American eats a single pound of seafood for every three consumed by his or her Japanese counterpart, for example. Gace mentions a final hurdle: â€Some environmentalists just don´t want to see this happen.â€

Actually, critics of OOA are from a broad social spectrum, including environmentalists, technophobes, commercial fishermen and marine biologists. Likewise, opposition ranges from ideological intransigence to skepticism rooted firmly in science. â€We are not against the idea of open-ocean aquaculture,†says Becky Goldburg, a senior scientist with the nonprofit Environmental Defense. â€We are opposed to it getting the green light without any environmental safeguards in placeâ€-which is how she and other opponents characterize the Bush administration bill to open federal waters to fish farming. (Under the bill, permits to set up an OOA operation would be issued at the sole discretion of the secretary of commerce, who oversees NOAA; environmental safeguards would be codified by the Environmental Protection Agency only after the bill became law.)

â€Aquaculture has a bad name in the U.S.,†says Loverich, and he concedes, â€There´s good reason for that.†According to a 2003 report by the Pew Oceans Commission, an independent expert panel funded by the Pew Charitable Trust, â€Over the past decade, nearly one million non-native Atlantic salmon have escaped from fish farms and established themselves in streams in the Pacific Northwest,†where they compete for food and spawning grounds with the salmon native to the area. Many of the problems, Loverich says, can be traced to the lack of government oversight as the industry was getting started in the 1970s. Diseases and deadly parasites swept through overcrowded pens, wiping out entire farms and spreading into wild populations.

Probably the most common problem came from allowing fish cages in the wrong places. â€A single farm might work well in a bay,†Loverich explains, â€but then with success, others wanted to do the same thing, and they were permitted to set up in the same area. It´s kind of like saying a septic system works well for one house, so let´s put two or three on the same system. Eventually it doesn´t work so well anymore, and everyone yells like hell.†Proponents maintain that OOA eliminates that problem, thanks to enormous currents that carry away fish wastes and dilute them into virtual nonexistence. â€It´s like throwing a pinch of flour into a fan,†says Randy Cates.