October 31, 2014 — The United States government is poised to release regulations that allow fish farmed in the open ocean to be labeled “organic.” This is a bad idea. Farming fish at sea can never meet the high bar of integrity that is integral to all organic systems of production.
Center for Food Safety’s new Report: Like Water and Oil: Ocean-Based Fish Farming and Organic Don’t Mix details, with scientific rigor, the four main reasons why that is so, explained below:
First, in open-ocean fish farms inputs and outputs cannot be monitored or controlled. That means that farmed fish can be exposed to toxic, synthetic substances that are present in seawater and ocean sediment, such as mercury, PCBs, and even radionuclides that can freely flow into fish farms. In fact, farmed fish has been documented to accumulate higher concentrations of some contaminants than wild fish. Concentrated fish feces, uneaten food, and other inputs also pollute the water that flows out of fish farms, altering marine habitats and changing the feeding behavior, physiology, and health of wild fish. This environmental degradation runs counter to the organic law.
Second, farmed fish routinely escape from open-ocean facilities in large numbers—over 24 million have been reported in just two decades. They carry pathogens and diseases to the ocean and rivers, restructure food webs through the introduction of non-native species competing for resources, and can lead to the extinction of wild fish of the same species in certain areas. These disruptions in marine ecosystems violate some of the basic tenets of organic, which include promoting ecological balance and conserving biodiversity.
Read the full opinion piece at the Christian Science Monitor