White House Looks To Open Coast For Fish Farmsff

The Bush administration wants to open the coastal waters to fish farms.

Some of those farms have been blamed for polluting the oceans. But not all fish farms raise concern. Nor do they all raise fish.

Abalone on its way to a Monterey restaurant was grown on a farm-- one of the most unusual farms in California.

It’s located in ocean water under the Monterey wharf. About a quarter million abalone are raised on a diet of kelp, itself farmed from the ocean.

With 80 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S. now coming from other nations, aquaculture--or fish farms--may become the next big industry.

”People want to eat more seafood”, said Monterey Abalone Company co-founder Art Seavey. “We want to eat seafood that is sustainable produced and is safely produced. It's not full of contaminants. We want to control how it’s grown and what's used to grow it.”

Last month, the Bush administration asked Congress to allow aquaculture in federal waters, from three miles off coastal states, out to 200 miles at sea. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, says this is its top legislative priority for 2007.

”NOAA is moving forward with this bill without a lot of real precautions being taken,” said Corey Peet of Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program. He believes there are not enough environmental safeguards in the proposed law.

Farmed salmon have been found to contain more toxins than wild salmon and the farms can create environmental dead zones caused by waste from the penned-in fish.

Most people, when they think of aquaculture, think of fish farms, because they've heard of Atlantic farm raised salmon. But there are many other types of farms. An abalone farm in Monterey is just one of them, and abalone, mussel and shellfish farms are considered the most environmentally friendly.

But farms that raise big predatory fish make the most money.

”There’s a real economic opportunity to farm these species like tuna and cod and halibut,” said Peet. “But from an ecological standpoint, those are the ones that are the most problematic. Their impacts are likely to be along the same lines as those of salmon farms.”

It takes twenty-five pounds of wild fish as food to produce one pound of farmed tuna, further straining the already-stressed oceans.