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The Truth About Fish Farms

  • Spence Cooper
  • April 12, 2010

According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, farmed fish now accounts for 50% of all fish and shellfish consumed around the globe. And fish farms are here to stay since approximately ninety percent of large fish like tuna, halibut, salmon, and swordfish have been depleted.

The disastrous global consequences from fish farming manifest in chilling ways unimaginable to consumers in developed countries.

Fish farms are a major source of pollution in the form of bio-accumulated toxins in fish feed and elevated exposure to dioxins and dioxin-like compounds that poison our bodies and destroy the ecosystem; but fish farms are also abysmally inefficient — it takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get one pound of farmed tuna.

The methods used in industrial farming in fresh or salt water fish require high energy inputs and cause the kind of environmental degradation indigenous to industrial and chemical agriculture or factory farming of livestock.

Environmental risks from fish farming include:

–> Loss of natural habitat and genetic diversity;

–> The replacement of self reliant indigenous fisheries with multinational corporations

–> Pollution from concentrated sewage represses bottom dwelling organisms, over fertilize the water and lead to toxic algae blooms — a single fin fish farm may output as much daily sewage as a small city

–> High stress overcrowding contributes to epidemic disease remedied by routine vaccinations and antibiotic treatments — cultivating drug resistant pathogens and impacting other aquatic wildlife

–> High concentrations of pathogens/parasites on the farm can infect the natural environment threatening local species; escaped domesticated farm fish can threaten local species with extinction through genetic pollution. [source – The Global Education Project]

Additionally, the toxic effects of fish farming is seen as far away as Nuevo Chimbote, a district in the province Santa in Peru, where pollution from fish farms have plagued the town’s children with debilitating asthma, allergies and rashes caused from noxious smoke and waste water.

In Chile, the salmon aquaculture industry is now the second largest in the world; the industry has expanded exponentially since 1990, and now exports more than half-a-million tons of fish annually.

Researchers suggest this massive growth has contributed to equally massive environmental and social effects where today “the coast of southern Chile, where the aquaculture industry is based, has been altered by the introduction of exotic species of salmon, high levels of pollution, and the spread of parasites and diseases among the fish. And the influx of large, corporate-run salmon farms has transformed traditional fishing communities and drastically altered the livelihoods of independent fishermen.”

The Truth About Fish FarmsWith aquaculture now accounting for half of all fish consumed worldwide, one researcher declared that the global community as a whole is fundamentally changing how it interacts with the ocean. And these changes include artificially altering the genetic structure of wild fish.

Even more alarming are claims made by The Norwegian University of Science and Technology: escaped fish from Norwegian salmon farms have interbred with wild salmon, and has changed the genetic composition of the country’s wild salmon stocks. “In rivers that have been affected by diseases or by parasites like Gyrodactylus, wild salmon stocks are weakened and are particularly vulnerable. It is easy for these stocks to be affected by wild salmon whose genes have been diluted by farmed fish.”

At a recent TED Talk, Dan Barber, the chef at New York’s Blue Hill restaurant, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Westchester, spoke of his discovery of a revolutionary fish farming method in Spain.

“Until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of the Argentinians. They raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands. They did it by draining the land. They built this intricate series of canals, and they pushed water off the land and out into the river. Well, they couldn’t make it work, not economically. And ecologically, it was a disaster. It killed like 90 percent of the birds, which, for this place, is a lot of birds. And so in 1982, a Spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land.

“What did they do? They reversed the flow of water. They literally flipped the switch. Instead of pushing water out, they used the channels to pull water back in. They flooded the canals. They created a 27,000 acre fish farm — bass, mullet, shrimp, eel — and in the process, Miguel, and this company, completely reversed the ecological destruction. The farm’s incredible. I mean, you’ve never seen anything like this. You stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away, and all you see are flooded canals and this thick, rich marshland.”

Whether this example of Spanish ingenuity changes the fish farm paradigm around the world remains to be seen, but it’s a start. In the meantime, here’s a list of which types of seafood are sustainable:

Sustainable Fish to Eat
* Arctic Char
* Barramundi
* Pacific Halibut
* Herring
* Jellyfish
* Atlantic Mackerel
* Mullet
* Mussels
* Oysters
* Pollock
* Sablefish
* Sardines
* Squid
* Trout
Source: NRDC

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