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ALASKA: Alaska legislators oppose Governorโ€™s fish farming proposal

February 26, 2025 โ€” Two prominent members of the Alaska House of Representatives have announced their opposition to Governor Mike Dunleavyโ€™s proposal to lift the stateโ€™s 35-year old ban on fish farming.

Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, and House Rules Committee Chair Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak, issued a joint statement on Monday, voicing their concerns that the bill would not benefit the stateโ€™s commercial fishing industry. Without their support, House Bill 111, which seeks to permit the farming of certain types of fish is unlikely to progress through the legislature, according to Alaska Beacon.

โ€œAlaskaโ€™s commercial fishing industry, our coastal communities, and fishing families across the state are suffering through historically poor market conditions, inconsistent returns, and unfair trade practices,โ€ the legislators wrote in their statement. โ€œMake no mistake, the industry will recover; however, lifting a ban on freshwater finfish farming sends the wrong signal, at the wrong time. It also erodes the spirit of the current ban and provides a foot in the door for possible salmon farming in Alaska.โ€

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Speaker Edgmon, Rep. Stutes issue statement against Dunleavyโ€™s fish farm bill

February 26, 2025 โ€” Speaker Bryce Edgmon and Rep. Louise Stutes have come out strongly against Gov. Mike Dunleavyโ€™s bill that would allow a limited amount of fish farming in Alaska.

Last Friday, Governor Mike Dunleavy introduced House Bill 111, legislation aimed at reversing Alaskaโ€™s absolute ban on fish farms. The bill has sparked immediate debate among lawmakers and stakeholders in the stateโ€™s fishing industry.

Under current law, Alaska prohibits fin fish farming, except for some nonprofit salmon hatcheries. HB 111 seeks to change that by granting the commissioner of the Department of Fish and Game, in consultation with the Commissioner of the Department of Conservation, the authority to permit the cultivation and sale of certain fin fish in inland, closed-system bodies of water.

Read the full article at Must Read Alaska

Canadian judge says young salmon must be tested before placed in net pens

February 6, 2019 โ€” A Canadian federal judge, in Vancouver, British Columbia, has ruled that fish farms must test their young salmon for contagious viruses before transferring them into open-net pens, StarMetro, a Vancouver newspaper, reports.

In her 199-page decision issued Monday, justice Cecily Strickland gave the Canadian Department of Fisheries an Oceans (DFO) four months to develop a new policy that considers the threat piscine reovirus (PRV) poses to wild salmon and to comply with the countryโ€™s preferred precautionary approach.

The ruling addresses two cases brought separately against DFO, the minister of fisheries and oceans and also Marine Harvest. One lawsuit was filed by biologist Alexandra Morton and the other by the โ€˜Namgis First Nation.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

NOAA plans to open federal waters in Pacific to fish farming

January 6, 2017 โ€” HONOLULU โ€” As traditional commercial fishing is threatening fish populations worldwide, U.S. officials are working on a plan to expand fish farming into federal waters around the Pacific Ocean.

The government sees the move toward aquaculture as a promising solution to overfishing and feeding a hungry planet. But some environmentalists say the industrial-scale farms could do more harm than good to overall fish stocks and ocean health.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is creating a plan to manage commercial fish farms in federal waters, the area of ocean from three to 200 miles offshore, around Hawaii and other Pacific islands.

The program is similar to one recently implemented by NOAA in the Gulf of Mexico. The farms in the Gulf and the Pacific would be the only aquaculture operations in U.S. federal waters, though there are smaller operations in state waters close to shore.

Fish farming has been practiced for centuries in Hawaii and around the world. But modern aquaculture, some environmentalists say, carries pollution risks and the potential for non-native farmed fish to escape and enter the natural ecosystem.

Most shellfish consumed in America comes from farms, and their methods are widely considered sustainable. However, some farms that grow carnivorous fish such as salmon have raised concerns about sustainability because they use wild-caught fish to feed the captive species.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Seattle Times

Gulf Of Mexico Open For Fish-Farming Business

February 8, 2016 โ€” The Gulf of Mexico is now open for commercial fish farming.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced last month that, for the first time in the U.S., companies can apply to set up fish farms in federal waters.

The idea is to compete with hard-to-regulate foreign imports. But opening the Gulf to aquaculture wonโ€™t be cheap, and it could pose environmental problems.

Harlon Pearce, the owner of Harlonโ€™s Louisiana Fish, which supplies restaurants and groceries across the South, says he welcomes the change. Around this time of year, his refrigerated warehouse outside New Orleans is stocked with catch.

โ€œYouโ€™ve got 30,000 pounds of fish right here, or more,โ€ he says.

Heโ€™s freezing a lot of it to keep up with year-round demand. He says heโ€™d like to sell nationwide, to big chains like Red Lobster, but โ€œwe never have enough fish to supply the markets. Never,โ€ he says.

Thatโ€™s true for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the seafood industry in the Gulf still hasnโ€™t bounced back from the 2010 BP oil spill. Secondly, the industry has always fluctuated, because of hurricanes and pollution.

Pearce, who is on the board of the Gulf Seafood Institute, says aquaculture could solve that.

The rest of the world is already heavily invested in farming fish. According to NOAA, 90 percent of fish in the U.S. comes from abroad and half of this is farmed. While fish farms exist in the U.S., the industry has yet to really take off. And, until now, federal waters had been off limits. The U.S. government says that opening up the Gulf to fish farms would reduce American dependence on foreign food and improve security.

Read the full story at NPR

Fish Farming In Gulf Poses Questions And Opportunities

February 3, 2016 โ€” Most of the fish we eat in the U.S. comes from other countries. Fishermen in Louisiana have long sought to displace some of those imports but the industry has faced challenges like hurricanes and the 2010 BP oil spill.

Now, a new source of fish in the gulf offers promise โ€” but also raises questions.

For the first time, the Gulf of Mexico is open for fish farming.

Companies can apply for permits through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency. Then they can install floating fish cages โ€” like those already in place in state waters off the coasts of Maine, Washington and Hawaii.

Harlon Pearce owns Harlonโ€™s LA Fish, which sells local fish to restaurants and grocery stores across the south. On a recent afternoon his refrigerated warehouse in Kenner was full of them. He pointed to yellowfin tuna, snapper, black drum and sheepโ€™s head. It doesnโ€™t always look this way.

Pearce, who is on the board of the Gulf Seafood Institute, says he freezes a lot of his fish in order to meet continuous demand, but ultimately always runs out. He wants to sell nationwide and contract with big chains, like Red Lobster, but he says, โ€œWe never have enough fish to supply the markets. Never.โ€

Thatโ€™s true for a couple of reasons โ€“ the seafood industry in the Gulf still hasnโ€™t bounced back from the 2010 BP oil spill, but itโ€™s always fluctuated due to hurricanes and pollution.

Read the full story at New Orleans Public Radio

 

To Save Its Salmon, California Calls in the Fish Matchmaker

January 15, 2016 โ€” HORNBROOK, Calif. โ€” On a frigid morning in a small metal-sided building, a team of specialists prepared to orchestrate an elaborate breeding routine. The work would be wet and messy, so they wore waders. Their tools included egg trays and a rubber mallet, which they used to brain a fertile female coho salmon, now hanging dead on a hook.

Diana Chesney, a biologist, studied a piece of paper with a matrix of numbers, each one denoting a male salmon and potential match for the female coho.

โ€œThis is the bible,โ€ she said of the matrix. โ€œItโ€™s what Carlos says.โ€

John Carlos Garza, a geneticist based a dayโ€™s drive south in Santa Cruz, has become a key figure in Californiaโ€™s effort to preserve its decimated salmon stocks. Using the latest genetic techniques, he and his team decide which individual fish should be bred together. At several major state conservation hatcheries, like the coho program here at Iron Gate, no two salmon are spawned until after Dr. Garza gives counsel โ€” a โ€œsalmon mating service,โ€ he jokingly calls it.

His painstaking work is the latest man-made solution to help fix a man-made problem that is about 150 years old: dams, logging, mining, farming, fishing and other industries have so fractured and polluted the river system that salmon can no longer migrate and thrive. In fact, today, owing to the battered habitat, virtually all salmon in California are raised in hatcheries.

Traditionally, the practice entailed killing fertile salmon and hand-mixing eggs and male milt, or sperm, then raising the offspring packed in containers or pools. When they were old enough to fend for themselves, they were released to rivers or sometimes trucked or ferried to release points to find the ocean on their own, a practice that gave them a necessary transition before they hit saltwater and a semblance of the quintessential salmon experience of migrating to the sea and back. To that end, they eventually swam back to hatcheries, where they became the next breeders in the cycle.

While hatcheries have helped propagate the species, they have also created new problems. The salmon they produce can be inbred and less hardy through domestication, hurting their chances for surviving and thriving in the wild.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Benefits of fish farms in Gulf of Mexico debated

January 12, 2016 โ€” NEW ORLEANS (AP) โ€“ Fish farming is contentious, with fishermen and environmentalists warning that new rules supporting it could harm the marine environment and put fishermen out of work.

Federal regulations were issued this week, allowing the farming of fish in federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Kathryn Sullivan, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the Gulf rules could spur similar rules in other U.S. waters and help the U.S. meet its seafood demands.

Typically, offshore farming is done by breeding fish in large semi-submersible pens moored to the seafloor. The practice is common in many parts of the world, and Sullivan said the United States has fallen behind. About 90 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported and more than half of that is farmed, she noted.

She said expanding fish farming has numerous benefits.

โ€œItโ€™s good for the balance of trade. Itโ€™s good for the food security of the country,โ€ she said. It could create jobs, she added.

The new rules allow up to 20 fish farms to open in the Gulf and produce 64 million pounds of fish a year. The farms can start applying for 10-year permits starting in February, she said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Houston Chronicle

 

The next food revolution: fish farming?

October 25, 2015 โ€” Sanggou Bay looks like a place where the pointillism movement has been unleashed on an ocean canvas. All across the harbor on Chinaโ€™s northeastern coast, thousands of tiny buoys โ€“ appearing as black dots โ€“ stretch across the briny landscape in unending rows and swirling patterns. They are broken only by small boats hauling an armada of rafts through the murky waters.

For centuries, Chinese fishermen have harvested this section of the Yellow Sea for its flounder, herring, and other species. Today the area is again producing a seafood bounty, though not from the end of a fishermanโ€™s rod or the bottom of a trawlerโ€™s net. Instead, the maze of buoys marks thousands of underwater pens or polyurethane ropes that hold oysters, scallops, abalone, Japanese flounder, mussels, sea cucumbers, kelp, and garish orange sea squirts. They are all part of one of the worldโ€™s biggest and most productive aquaculture fields. Sanggou Bay is a seafood buffet on a colossal scale.

The buoys here extend for miles out to the horizon, offering, on an aluminum-gray day, the only clue to where the ocean stops and the sky begins. Hundreds of migrant workers โ€“ many from as far away as Myanmar (Burma) โ€“ pilot the fishing boats zigzagging around the floats, shuttling fish to shore, checking the lines for mussels and oysters, and voyaging farther out to sea to harvest seaweed.

Read the full story at The Christian Science Monitor

 

 

Access Granted to Chileโ€™s Salmon Farming Antibiotic Use Info

CHILE โ€” September 14, 2015 โ€” Oceana has been granted access to information on Chileโ€™s salmon farming antibiotic use between 2009 and 2013, following a unanimous ruling by Santiagoโ€™s Court of Appeals.

โ€œWe are pleased to hear the reversal of an incorrect ruling by the Transparency Council. Clearly, this is public information as it allows people to make decisions on fundamental issues, such as health and the environment, in addition to making scrutiny on whether the Government is effectively controlling this industry or not,โ€ stated Alex Muรฑoz, Vice President for Oceana in Chile.

In July 2014, Oceana resorted to the Transparency Council after 50 salmon farms refused to reveal the amount and type of antibiotics used by them, on the grounds that this would entail โ€œa competitive and commercial risk.โ€

The Transparency Council agreed with the salmon farms and declared that the National Fishery Service is not required to reveal disaggregated figures.

Read the full story from The Fish Site

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