Over 100 species of finfish and over 50 species of shellfish are now grown in commercial or experimental aquaculture operations around the world. Tilapia, which is now available in Costco and other large chains, makes a firm white fillet. Tilapia production is growing rapidly in tropical and subtropical countries, as is basa, a Vietnamese variety of catfish that is popular in many North American restaurants. Farmed Atlantic cod and sablefish (Alaska black cod) are already on the market and other species, such as sturgeon, halibut, and tuna are not far behind.
While fish farm production can still increase considerably in sheltered inshore waters, with the currently available feed supply there are three ways in which production could become much larger.
First, aquaculture operations can move offshore, where the pens can be anchored below the surface to avoid the destructive power of storms. There are already a number of pilot offshore aquaculture operations in service around the world. A float at the surface is tethered to a submerged feeding tube that can be pulled to the surface by a ship servicing tens of such cages along the continental shelves. The activists are so strongly opposed to fish farming that they have set themselves preemptively against open ocean fish farms, where all of the previously mentioned supposed environmental harms have even less validity. In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has proposed greatly expanding fish farming in the internationally recognized Exclusive Economic Zones that extend 200 miles from each nation’s shoreline. The U.S. wants to sell multiyear leases to fish farmers based on a percentage of their sales. In these open waters, wastes from the fish are greatly diluted and washed away with the currents to be absorbed by algae. Experimental offshore fish farms miles from shore have raised halibut, cod, red snapper, and tuna. The response from the environmentalist community has been predictable wailing over the “industrializing” of the seas by greedy big business. Anne Mosness with the anti-biotech, antidevelopment Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the U.S.’s open ocean proposal is “the equivalent of having a hog farm in a city park flushing its wastes into the street.”[24] Pure nonsense.
Second, if geneticists can enhance land crops like soybeans and corn so that they contain omega-3 oils and other essential nutrients, this will vastly increase the feed supply. It will then make more economic sense to feed these crops to fish rather than to less efficient land animals. Don’t worry: there will still be steaks for the barbecue and bacon for breakfast, but it would be very good for all of us who eat meat if fish consumption went up and consumption of red meat went down.
Third, we will learn how to use the waste from fish farms as a way of feeding shellfish grown nearby. The beauty of shellfish, such as oysters, mussels, and clams, is that they obtain their food from plankton growing in the ocean: there is no need to feed them directly. Plankton thrive on the nutrients from fish waste. Designed properly, the combination of finfish and shellfish farming could dramatically increase seafood production while simultaneously removing any excess nutrients from the ocean.
There is every reason to believe that we could increase seafood production by five to ten times over the next century while at the same time improving the environment for wild fisheries. We are quite capable of managing wild fisheries sustainably. The real problem is our inability to manage fish stocks that spend their time in international waters or migrating from one country’s territory into another’s. The collapse of the Atlantic cod and Atlantic salmon were both the result of 15 or more nations’ fishing fleets competing for the same fish with no coordinated management plan. In the North Pacific, where only four countries—Canada, the U.S., Japan, and Russia—had fleets, they were able to create formal agreements that resulted in considerable success in managing halibut and salmon sustainably.
The greatest obstacle to the sustainable management of many fisheries is the classic “tragedy of the commons.” It is virtually automatic that a species will be overfished if it is a public resource with no effective management system in place. As each fisherman or fishing fleet tries to maximize its catch, so do all the others. This leads to declining stocks and declining catches, which spiral downward and end in collapse. It is easy to blame this on “corporate greed” and other such scapegoats, but it is really the lack of any institutional framework for effective management that is to blame.
One of the most effective ways to overcome this tragedy is to establish a system of allocations known as individual tradable quotas (ITQs). Each fisherman buys or is granted a quota, allowing him or her to catch a certain amount of a given species with a particular type of gear. The sum of the individual quotas is the allowable catch, which can be raised or lowered, affecting everyone’s quota proportionally. The quotas can be bought and sold on the open market, so the healthier the stock the more value the quotas have. Therefore it is in every fisherman’s interest to ensure that the stocks are healthy, and so they will support reductions in catch when necessary. Through private interest a self-policing system emerges that results in the opposite of the tragedy of the commons. It is the triumph of self-interest, transforming “greed” into “need.”
The only problem with the ITQ system is that many so-called environmental groups, entrenched fishing interests, and leftist activists remain vehemently opposed to it. Even though there are well-established successful examples, such as the Alaskan salmon fishery and the Dungeness crab fishery, they object to the “privatization” of a public resource. They argue that because fish are a public resource all members of the public should have access to them and that ITQs amount to turning public property into a private monopoly. Certainly there are some good examples of socialism, like universal health care, but free-for-all fishing isn’t one of them. Under the ITQ system, the public, through government, receives their rent from the fishermen through a royalty, some of which can be used to enhance the fishery. In the end, it is the seafood-consuming public that is the real beneficiary, certainly more so than if the species were wiped out through lack of effective management.
[1]. Paper Buying for Individuals: Go Ancient Forest Friendly, Greenpeace International, December 3, 2008, http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/forests/solutions/paper-buying-for-individuals
[2]. Steven Hedlund, “FAO: Aquaculture Nearly Half of Global Seafood Production,” SeafoodSource, March 2, 2009, http://www.seafoodsource.com/newsarticledetail.aspx?id=2678
[3]. UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “World Review of Fisheries and Aquaculture,” ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/011/i0250e/i0250e01.pdf
[4]. Optimal Heart Health, “Heart Attack and the Benefit of Fish Oil,” http://www.optimal-heart-health.com/benefitoffishoil.html
[5]. Laterlife, “Oily Fish Reduces the Risk of Dementia and Alzheimer’s,” May 2004 http://www.laterlife.com/laterlife-oily-fish.htm
[6]. Martha Clare Morris et al., “Consumption of Fish and n-3 Fatty Acids and Risk of Incident Alzheimer Disease,” Archives of Neurology 60, no. 7 (July 2003).
[7]. Salmon Farming Backgrounder, Wilderness Committee, http://wildernesscommittee.org/what_we_do/salmon_farming_backgrounder
[8]. West Greenland Commission, “West Greenland Fishery Sampling Agreement,” 2008, http://www.nasco.int/sas/pdf/wgc(08)06.pdf
[9]. Stephen Leahy, “Fish Farms Pushing Wild Salmon to Extinction,” December 14, 2007, http://ipsnorthamerica.net/print.php?idnews=1218
[10]. Martin Krkosek, Jennifer S. Ford, Alexandra Morton, Subhash Lele, Ransom A. Myers, Mark A. Lewis: “Declining Wild Salmon Populations in Relation to Parasites from Farm Salmon,” Science 318, no. 5857 (December 14, 2007): 1772–1775.
[11]. Brian E. Riddell, Richard J. Beamish, Laura J. Richards, John R. Candy: “Comment on ‘Declining Wild Salmon Populations in Relation to Parasites from Farm Salmon’,” Science 322, no. 5909: 1790 (December 19, 2008). DOI: 10.1126/science.1156341
[12]. Fisheries and Oceans Canada, “Facts About Sea Lice,” November 3, 2009, http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/aquacultur
e/lice-pou/lice-pou04-eng.htm
[13]. “Sockeye Run Estimates Upped to 34 Million,” Michael Loubet, FIS Canada, September 1, 2010, http://fis.com/fis/worldnews/worldnews.asp?l=e&country=0&special=&monthyear=&day=&id=37982&ndb=1&df=0
[14]. “Critics Claim Wild Fish Still At Risk From Farm Stock,” Carlito Pablo, Straight.com, September 2, 2010, http://www.straight.com/article-341759/vancouver/critics-claim-wild-fish-risk-farm-stock
[15]. European Parliament, “The Fish Meal and Fish Oil Industry: Its Role in the Common Fisheries Policy,” December 2003, http://www.consult-poseidon.com/reports/EP%20Role%20of%20Fish%20Oil-Meal%20in%20the%20CFP.pdf
[16]. Mera Pharmaceuticals, “Carotenoids,”
http://www.astaxanthin.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3:carotenoids&catid=14:general&Itemid=4#Q2
[17]. Health Marketplace, “Canthaxanthin,” http://www.health-marketplace.com/Canthaxanthin.htm
[18]. Emma L. Teuten, Li Xu, Christopher M. Reddy, “Two Abundant Bioaccumulated Halogenated Compounds Are Natural Products,” Science 307, no. 5711 (February 11, 2005),: 917–920.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/307/5711/917?hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&FIRSTINDEX=0&maxtoshow=&HITS=10&fulltext=whale+pcb&searchid=1&resourcetype=HWCIT
[19]. Ronald Hite et al, “Global Assessment of Organic Contaminants in Farmed Salmon,” Science 303, no. 5655 (January 9, 2005),: 226-229. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/303/5655/226
[20]. Sierra Williams, Jon Buchholz, Krystin Habighorst, and Will Newberr, “Persistent Organic Pollutants in Alaskan Consumers,” March 22, 2004,
http://seagrant.uaf.edu/nosb/papers/2004/soldotna-pops.html
[21]. James West, Sandra O’Neill, Greg Lippert and Stephen Quinnell, “Toxic Contaminants in Marine and Anadromous Fishes From Puget Sound, Washington: Results of the Puget Sound Ambient Monitoring Program Fish Component, 1989-1999,” August 2001, http://wdfw.wa.gov/fish/psamp/toxiccontaminants.pdf
[22]. Susan Sampson, “The Great Salmon Debate,” Toronto Star, September 15, 2004, http://www.beattystreetpublishing.com/confessions/references/the-great-salmon-debate
[23]. The Demarketing of Farmed Salmon, Vivian Krause, April 23, 2010,
http://fairquestions.typepad.com/files/demarketingfarmedsalmon30s.pdf
[24]. Bruce McClure, “Bush Seeks Expansion of Offshore Fish Farms,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 8, 2005, http://www.seattlepi.com/local/227623_fishfarms08.html
Chapter 13 -
Round Tables and Square Pegs
Back to late 1989 at Quatsino Seafarms. I received a call from Lee Doney, then Deputy Minister of the Environment for British Columbia. He wanted to know if I would be interested in joining a new initiative, the B.C. Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. I was thrilled and jumped at the chance.
The United Nations report, Our Common Future, which had first publicized the concept of sustainable development five years after I heard it discussed in Nairobi, put forward two other important ideas. It suggested governments, at all levels from local to national, should appoint round tables, with representatives from all walks of life, to provide elected bodies with advice on how to achieve sustainability. The round tables would operate according to the principles of consensus, in other words, not by Robert’s Rules, where a majority vote defeats a minority. In addition the report suggested that not enough land was protected from industrial development. The figure then was about 4 percent globally. The report advocated that it be tripled to 12 percent on the basis of representing the many varieties of ecosystems (forests, grasslands, wetlands, alpine regions, etc.).
The call from Lee Doney was like someone had read my mind during the five years I struggled with moving from confrontation to consensus. I felt lucky I was a Canadian because Canada took up the round table movement like no other country. This was due in large part to the fact that two Canadians were instrumental in producing the report. Maurice Strong, who had chaired the 1972 UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm and would go on to chair the UN Environment Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, was an influential member of the United Nations that produced the report . And Jim McNeil, a former deputy minister in the federal government, had written the report. Needless to say they had strong connections in Ottawa and Canadian society in general and they pressed their colleagues into making their recommendations a reality. By early 1990 the national government, all 10 provincial governments, and both territories had announced the formation of round tables on the environment and the economy. A short-lived revolution in Canadian political life had begun.
Following the publication of the Brundtland Report, as Our Common Future was also known, the former president of the University of British Columbia, David Strangway, was asked by the provincial government to write a report on the feasibility of establishing a round table to consider the issues around sustainability for British Columbia. His report formed the basis for our province’s entry into the round table movement in Canada. CBC Radio News carried the B.C. government’s announcement that a round table would be formed to our short-wave radio in Winter Harbour. They were looking for volunteers. I phoned the toll-free number and put my name in the hat.
By this time, in the summer of 1990, our little family-run salmon farm was foundering. Since we had begun in 1984, much had changed in the industry. Where there once had been a few pioneers with homemade equipment, there were now large corporations investing millions in state-of-the-art facilities. Where there had once been limited supply and high prices, there was now a lot of farmed salmon on the markets and prices fell steadily. And now the new farms were switching from growing Pacific chinook salmon to Atlantic salmon, a costlier investment, but a faster growing fish less susceptible to disease. Our profit margin shrunk until it went below the waterline.
None of us had much money, so we could not operate at a loss for a long period. The consolidation of the industry was just beginning as companies with deep pockets bought up smaller companies even though they were losing money, just to stay in the game. I could see the writing on the wall and realized we probably wouldn’t make a go of it in the long run. Salmon farming had clearly become big business and that wasn’t us.
The round table provided a perfect opportunity for me to begin the transition from salmon farming back into environmental work, only this time in the context of sustainability. Here was a chance to be around the same table with thinking people from all walks of life to discuss how we could balance the needs of the people with the needs of the environment. Unfortunately the environmental groups weren’t quite as thrilled to get an invitation as I was. In all of British Columbia, the birthplace of Greenpeace, only two other people with green credentials agreed to join the process. One was Bob Peart, a member of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, who turned out to be a very thoughtful participant and one who genuinely sought consensus. The other was Vicky Husband of the Sierra Club, a firebrand and no friend of the forest industry, nor any industry for that matter. She had joined reluctantly after much arm-twisting. The government needed to have an environmental activist on board and she had finally consented.
It turned out Vicky was one of the very few environmental activists in the whole of Canada to join the 13 round tables formed in 1990. Her reluctance to join was partly due to pressure from her colleagues to turn down the invitation. Not a single Greenpeace representative ever joined the effort, even though many were asked. For me, this confirmed my conclusion that activists in the environmental movement had become so insular that they chose to boycott the very process that could bring their ideas into the mainstream. But they didn’t want to talk about sustainability or consensus, they wanted to continue to fight a war through the media, a war in which they were the good guys and their targets were branded as the enemies of the earth.
I joined in the meetings with enthusiasm. There were 30 of us, chosen from a wide range of professions and regions of the province. There were mayors and ex-mayors, labor leaders and busines
s people, ranchers and foresters, tourist operators and fish farmers. Most of us were chosen because we had multiple perspectives, mine being environmental activism, aquaculture, and forestry. Chuck Connaghan, a seasoned labor/management negotiator, was appointed facilitator and Lee Doney was given the full-time job of heading our secretariat. Our budget exceeded $2 million, so we had the resources to pay for travel, per diems, and consultants. A new kind of think tank was born. We were a true citizens’ group with real resources and access to the highest levels of decision making in our government.
There were not many published guides to running a round table with 30 different perspectives on sustainability. One book that helped us get oriented was Getting to Yes.”[1] In it Roger Fisher and William Ury present four principles for negotiating agreements:
• Separate the people from the problem.
• Focus on interests rather than positions.
• Generate a variety of options before settling on an agreement; and
• Insist that the agreement be based on objective criteria.
This approach influenced the entire round table, consensus-based movement in the early 1990s and provided a base from which to move forward.
We soon realized the scope of our task was enormous. We had been charged with developing sustainability policy recommendations for all aspects of society, the economy, and the environment. Needless to say it took us a while to get a sense of direction. Many of the early meetings were simply about discussing the meaning of sustainability and getting to know one another. There was a wide range of opinions and attitudes, which spanned the spectrum from very preservationist to outright capitalistic. The beauty of sustainability is that it allows for this wide range. There is a place for total preservation and a place for relatively unfettered commerce. There is a place for community and there is a place for globalization. There is a place for culture and for science.
Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist Page 22