A snorkeler checks up on Kona Blue's farmed yellowtail .     (Courtesy Kona Blue)

In 1999 the state of Hawaii granted Cates International permits to set up operation in state waters, and the company became the first private OOA outfit to start production in the U.S. Randy Cates currently sells 8,000 pounds of moi a week, but with plans in the works for a total of 16 cages and a new hatchery already going up, he expects to be selling four million pounds of the fish annually within two years—more than the total caught in Hawaii over the past half-century.

Cates was the first, but others are rushing to catch up. Snapperfarm Inc. in Puerto Rico raises cobia and sells it—still in small quantities—to restaurants in Miami and New York. There’s another fledgling farm in the Bahamas, and off the Big Island of Hawaii, a company called Kona Blue is raising sushi-quality yellowtail in SeaStation cages.

The U.S. now leads the world in designing and building cages for OOA, but that doesn’t mean the industry’s future in this country is guaranteed. “We are light-years behind the rest of the world in all other aspects of fish farming,” maintains Cates, citing basic biological research on promising species, development of more-efficient hatchery technologies and a political consensus to develop a globally competitive fish-farming industry.

SeaStation inventor Gary Loverich is similarly rankled. Since selling his first two cages to a company in the Philippines in 1996, he says, about half of the 35 giant cages built have ended up in foreign waters. The list of countries experimenting with OOA includes Australia, Chile, China, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Russia and Spain. “And in the U.S.,” says Loverich, frustrated, “we are still debating whether or not fish farming should be allowed.”

Part of the disparity is cultural, says Net Systems’s Langley Gace. “Aquaculture is relatively new for most Americans. But it’s been a part of Asian life for thousands of years.” Market forces also account for some of the difference, he adds. A typical American eats a single pound of seafood for every three consumed by his or her Japanese counterpart, for example. Gace mentions a final hurdle: “Some environmentalists just don’t want to see this happen.”

Actually, critics of OOA are from a broad social spectrum, including environmentalists, technophobes, commercial fishermen and marine biologists. Likewise, opposition ranges from ideological intransigence to skepticism rooted firmly in science. “We are not against the idea of open-ocean aquaculture,” says Becky Goldburg, a senior scientist with the nonprofit Environmental Defense. “We are opposed to it getting the green light without any environmental safeguards in place”—which is how she and other opponents characterize the Bush administration bill to open federal waters to fish farming. (Under the bill, permits to set up an OOA operation would be issued at the sole discretion of the secretary of commerce, who oversees NOAA; environmental safeguards would be codified by the Environmental Protection Agency only after the bill became law.)

“Aquaculture has a bad name in the U.S.,” says Loverich, and he concedes, “There’s good reason for that.” According to a 2003 report by the Pew Oceans Commission, an independent expert panel funded by the Pew Charitable Trust, “Over the past decade, nearly one million non-native Atlantic salmon have escaped from fish farms and established themselves in streams in the Pacific Northwest,” where they compete for food and spawning grounds with the salmon native to the area. Many of the problems, Loverich says, can be traced to the lack of government oversight as the industry was getting started in the 1970s. Diseases and deadly parasites swept through overcrowded pens, wiping out entire farms and spreading into wild populations.

Probably the most common problem came from allowing fish cages in the wrong places. “A single farm might work well in a bay,” Loverich explains, “but then with success, others wanted to do the same thing, and they were permitted to set up in the same area. It’s kind of like saying a septic system works well for one house, so let’s put two or three on the same system. Eventually it doesn’t work so well anymore, and everyone yells like hell.” Proponents maintain that OOA eliminates that problem, thanks to enormous currents that carry away fish wastes and dilute them into virtual nonexistence. “It’s like throwing a pinch of flour into a fan,” says Randy Cates.

Michael Weber groans when he hears this kind of talk. “We’ve seen this movie before,” insists the former special assistant to the director of the National Marine Fisheries Service. “And it doesn’t end nicely.” He cautions that our history is filled with grand schemes for fishing, backed by the government and focused solely on increasing production. People thought any problems or miscalculations would be swallowed up by the vastness of the sea.

“So much of the boosterism around aquaculture today reminds me of the 1960s,” Weber says. “Scientists back then believed that we could take 500 million metric tons a year from the ocean, so that’s how our fisheries were managed.” But the ocean could afford to give up only about 20 percent of that figure. “We’re living with the consequences of that error today,” he observes, in crashed fisheries and the economically shattered communities left in their wake. And even if the increased volume of seawater does take care of nutrient pollution (a few studies suggest that that may be the case, but the issue is far from settled), Weber charges that OOA does nothing to address some of aquaculture’s other problems, such as the spread of disease from farmed to wild fish and “gene pollution” from escapees interbreeding with local populations.

Cates has anticipated these objections. Disease is unlikely to be a problem for him, he says, because of the cleansing effect of the strong ocean currents off Oahu—and because his cages aren’t overpacked or crowded into one area (conditions likely to lead to an outbreak). Since he raises moi, a local fish, gene pollution isn’t a concern either. If you spend any time with Cates, it’s easy to see him as a poster boy for OOA, creating a financially successful business that’s sensitive to the environment. But that’s exactly the problem, maintains Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist with the nonprofit advocacy group Oceana: “Not everybody is a Randy Cates. That’s why we need strong regulations—to require all OOA operators to be diligent about taking care of the environment.”

The Farmer Goes to Sea  | 1  | 2 | 3  |

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