January 9, 2020 — The fight over whether offshore aquaculture should be allowed in US federal waters and which agency should regulate it is back in court with lawyers for a group of fishing and food safety interests arguing that new legislation is needed for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to regulate it.
In September 2018, US district court judge Jane Triche Milazzo, in the Eastern District of Louisiana, granted a motion by the Center for Food Safety (CFS) and a coalition of fishing and public interest groups it represented to grant a summary judgment in its lawsuit against NOAA’s National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) to block its efforts to establish aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico.
CFS had successfully argued that the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), which gives NOAA and NMFS much of their legal authority, gave the agencies authority over only wild-capture fisheries, not aquaculture.