Aquaculture-fish farming-is a growing business, but is it safe food?

This is the written copy for the Culinary Libertarian podcast about aquaculture. For the most part, it is as spoken, but some changes have been made for reading ease.  This is the text to this episode.

You might be that seafood lover who eats everything. Or you might be that person who likes only fried shrimp.

There was a point in time not really very long ago that if you lived far from saltwater, you didn’t get saltwater fish at the grocery store. At least not fresh. Fish sticks and breaded fish fillets have been around for a long time. If you now simply have to know, fish sticks were perfected in 1953.

As seafood goes, and this is the broad strokes, if it was in saltwater it is included. There are really two choices of sourcing: commercial wild-caught or farmed.

I am excluding recreational since you can’t buy it in a store or order it off of a menu.

Commercial fishing turns out to be rather interesting. I may do a show on that later. Today’s focus is farmed fish. You can probably name half a dozen fish or shellfish that are farmed: clams, oysters, mussels, salmon, catfish, and shrimp. Maybe you got trout and tilapia and orange roughie. You might have missed Arctic Char, Scallops, turbot, carp, and tuna.

The business, and it is a business-big business into billions of dollars a year-is aquaculture.

A few years ago I visited the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute near Fort Pierce, Florida. Of the many things they do and research, aquaculture is one of them. They raise seed clams, showed us a kind of closed system which raises hydroponic greens and fish together. In their example, basil is the product crop, and Tilapia offer fertilizer for the plants and both the herbs and fish are harvested. Now a visit to their web page shows they are working on redfish, pompano, cobia, and edible seaweed. They note that 50% of the world’s fish comes from aquaculture, but less than 1% comes from the US.[1]

Seems an easy fix to increase the fish coming from American aquaculture farms, right? Buy American. The trouble is, with shrimp, you can’t do that very easily.

According to Matt McCreless of Southern Seafood in Tallahassee, the US farmed shrimp market is small and generally too expensive. The website, seafoodsource.com published an interview with Jeffery Lotz, who notes that the low price of imported shrimp makes domestic farmed shrimp prices unattractive, adding, “[w]ith the shrimp disease problems a couple of years ago, there was a lot of interest in domestic shrimp production. But now they have managed the problems, and the prices are not high enough for shrimp farming to look attractive at this point.” I will say this is from a 2010 article. One challenge I had, perhaps due to poor search queries, was finding current content about shrimp farming.

The content I did find on shrimp aquaculture isn’t pleasant. I am also going to come back to that shrimp disease issue.

Since about half the seafood sold is from aquaculture, there’s a good chance the shrimp and salmon and shellfish in the grocery’s case are farm-raised. Of the shrimp in the case, it is almost certain it is not farm-raised in the US so it is either wild-caught, and country of origin labels will reveal from where it was harvested, or if it is farmed. So, now the issue is, what happened at that farm?

What’s going on?

Now we get to the heart of the problem. The conditions under which those shrimp were raised, what they were fed, what they were treated with, yes, shrimp can get sick, can affect and impact the wholesomeness of the shrimp. There remains an impact to the humans doing the harvesting and an impact to the immediate environment.

A Forest Peoples Programme website article, from 2010, reads, “[i]ndustrial shrimp aquaculture has been widely attributed to a host of serious problems, including the destruction of community-owned mangrove forests and wetlands, the undermining of food security, land grabbing, labour abuses and even murder. Shrimps fed on genetically modified soya from the deforested plains of Latin America and the degraded anchovy ecosystems of Peru, are air-freighted and shipped around the world in freezer compartments to our plates – tropical shrimp production is perhaps the least sustainable mass-produced protein on the planet. Not that you would know that from the supermarket aisles however: words like ‘responsible’, ‘community-friendly’ and ‘co-operative’ adorn supermarket packaging, all too often made with the explicit endorsements of weak, industry-dominated eco-labels.”[2]

According to the oceana.org blog post, imported farmed shrimp can contain illicit antibiotics. The article continues, stating, “[a] 2015 Consumer Reports[3] study found that of 205 imported shrimp samples, 11 from Vietnam, Thailand, and Bangladesh were contaminated with antibiotic residues. Some of these antibiotics have been linked to cancers[4], while others are illegal to administer to food animals in the United States.”[5]

Overseas shrimp farms, and overseas means mostly Thai, Indonesia, and India.

I want to revisit, quickly, the mangrove issue. Mangrove trees serve as homes for smaller fish. From the Oceana.org blog post, mangrove forests hold onto “greenhouse gas in their wood and leaves, they also help to lay down thick layers of soil-like peat”,[6] for many years. Destroying mangrove forests and beds releases that carbon.

One challenge farmed shrimp present is the same problem farmed fish presents: they have to eat.

What are they being fed?

In many cases, the food is made from wild-caught fish, sardines and anchovies, ground up, with vitamins added. The finished feed resembles something like dry dog or cat food. For farm-raised herbivore fish, no wild fish is use for the feed pellets. In the feed for both kinds of fish producers depend on plant protein wholly or as a supplement. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oversees fisheries. They write on one of their fisheries pages, “Farmed fish are fed diets specially designed for their nutritional needs.  This feed contains all the essential nutrients needed to keep them healthy and growing. . . . Fish nutritional needs vary by species. Herbivorous fish eat a feed mixture that may contain plant proteins (e.g., soy, corn), vegetable oils, minerals, and vitamins. In the wild, carnivorous fish such as salmon eat other fish. Therefore, feeds for farmed carnivorous fish (as well as many herbivorous fish) include fish oils and proteins as well as plant proteins, minerals, and vitamins that achieve the nutrition requirements of the fish and offer health benefits to humans.”[7]

NOAA, of course, speaks to and about US-based fisheries. Norway, Scotland, and Chili farm salmon, and have issues of their own issues.

At the risk of scaring you, there is a concern about eating farmed salmon. The sentienmedia.org website article, “Farmed Salmon: What is Farmed Salmon & Is It Safe to Eat,” the article reads, “[t]here is growing consensus[8] in the scientific community that farmed salmon are no longer safe for humans to eat. Farmed salmon often ingest harmful contaminants[9] from the water they live in, which can be stagnant and dirty due to biological waste, as well as waste from chemicals that farmers use on them.”[10]

Aquaculture brings challenges and one is disease and another, the infestation of pests, particularly sea lice. I mentioned that some of the content I found seemed possibly out of date. A 2016 article posted on the oceana.org site, reads, “Chile’s salmon industry has amped up its use of antibiotics every year since 2010. In 2015, salmon farmers there used 660 grams of antibiotics per metric ton of fish. Norway, in contrast, produces more salmon than Chile but uses far fewer drugs — around 0.17 grams per ton. ”[11]   You should read the article. A point I will make is salmon bacteria are much like human bacteria: they grow resistant to the antibiotics. The cycle of creating stronger antibiotics to deal with the resistant strains opens the question what is the effect on the people eating those fish?

Scotland is not immune from aquaculture challenges. According to a BBC.com article from 2019, “[w]ild salmon is no longer fished commercially anywhere in the UK.”[12]

Aquaculture takes on various forms from ponds or pools on land to massive nets suspended in lakes or oceans. Scotland uses the net system, almost like underwater pens, and the fish are raised in these pens.

Fish raised in pens in water are subject to infestation such as sea lice. And, in fact, “disease, parasites and even chemicals designed to treat them can all prove fatal.” As the article reads, 9.5 million fish die, which is about 20% of the total.

David Ainsley, in that BBC blog post, runs a tour company and notes, “[w]e’ve had a history of weak regulation of salmon farming – a history where the sensible distances between farms have been reduced, where farms are allowed to pollute much greater areas.

“When the levels of the chemicals in the seabed exceed the allowable standards, nothing is done, a blind eye is turned to it and the industry is just allowed to continue.”[13]

In that same article, the salmon industry of Norway is presented for comparison. Arnfinn Torgnes, in Bronnoysund, comments, “[t]he authorities control us in a stronger way than they do in Scotland. But, I accept and am agreed that that’s a good thing for us.”[14]

In the Scotland example, one issue is the lack of inspections. The article does note that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency has been criticized for poor regulation.

By way of example, the restaurant inspections in the states are, in my experience, poorly done. In the case of health inspectors, they are too few with too much to do.

Some fish, pompano, cobia, salmon, redfish, have rather short sexual maturity cycles that allow for reproduction. Bluefin tuna is a whole other problem.

Part of the problem is lack of strict accountability and part of the problem is taking advantage of that absence which leads to overfishing. Rich Ruais, the director of the East Coast Tuna Association, said in a 2008 LiveScience.com article, “It isn’t greed that’s driving this, it’s mismanagement”[15]

In 2008 the idea of aquaculture tuna was an idea. From the same LiveScience.com article, “I think that about 10 years from now, we’ll get bluefin tuna to breed via land-based hatcheries,” said Yonathan Zohar, the director of the University of Maryland Center of Marine Biotechnology. “It’s only a matter of time and resources.”[16]

Move ahead to 2019, in a blog post on the aquaculturenorthamerica.com page, Alejandro Buentello tells them, “Bluefin tuna aquaculture represents a major, new high-value market for U.S. farmers, but there is much science to be done to produce the fish entirely under farmed conditions,” says Sally Rockey, FFAR executive director. “This research has the potential to not only stabilize the wild population, but also create economic opportunities in farming the delicacy.”[17]

Tuna aquaculture seems here to stay and improve. For US producers, one key question is will they come under the thumb of NOAA and the USDA or FDA or can they find a way to nullify those agencies through private monitoring? That’s as much a suggestion to better management of their product as it is a question about what to expect.

Now what?

The question of what to do remains. The US has no shortage of regulation. The US has shown, also, that, in the aggregate, regulation in an industry tends to put the price higher for the end good or service.

Dispassionate discourse about government, policy, and unintended consequences rarely occurs. Emotion run high and reason takes a break. Examples of too much regulation are plentiful, but also conceal information. Recent examples of salad contamination are usually followed by remarks about needing more regulation. I realize I’m opening a kettle of fish here, pun intended, but the primary point is those illnesses were caused after inspections did or did not happen. More regulation would not have prevented that. Similarly, the massive control of meat processing only makes e-coli infections worse since one plant may ship contaminated ground beef to over a dozen states. And, that meat came from a USDA inspected plant.

What most people may not know is the USDA regulates the speeds at which chicken and beef plants may operate. In the April, 2020 post on foodandpower.net, an article includes this passage, “In the past month, the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) allowed four poultry plants to increase their processing speeds and granted an unprecedented waiver for a beef plant to operate at faster speeds with fewer inspectors on the line. The agency also accepted applications for controversial changes in pork slaughter and welcomed a new food safety chief with deep industry ties.”[18] The meat industry has its own issues, to be sure. The point made here is regulations that are overlooked or endanger the workers or consumers are hardly worth having or enforcing.

If the government made the problem then more government to fix the problem made by previously smaller government clearly is not the answer. Sounds like Vizzini, right?

I will concede that rules need to exist. Inspections are a good idea. Regulations and standardization are too. But, not from the government.

Private enterprise is fully capable of fixing this problem. Before you shift in your seat and protest, the restaurant and grocery industry use a third party inspection service which will check for exactly what they are asked to find. I’ve seen this company work for two different grocery chains and they are far and away superior to the inspections performed by the state. The only problem is they don’t have the force of the state behind them so their inspections are only helpful information. In both stores, this third party company was a test inspection to be ready for the state, which always performed an inferior inspection. That inferior inspection came with the blessing of the state to continue doing business.

Fish farms, as we’ve seen from the Scotland example, are poorly inspected. They would benefit from an industry third party system.

Guilds or associations can agree upon what the criteria are to be for inspections and insurance companies can, through premium increases or breaks, act as the enforcement entity.

What is needed, in short, is to establish private property rights. What is needed are water homesteading rights. Murray Rothbard wrote in 1986, “In short, since homesteading private property rights has generally not been permitted in parts of the ocean, the oceans and other water resources have remained in a primitive state, much as land had been in the days before private property in land was permitted and recognized.”[19]

Such an industry-specific system would require inventing it. It would require establishing punitive powers that come with an agreed burden of noncompliance. The aquaculture industry in the US would almost certainly establish better standards since they would be the direct beneficiaries of better products.

Farm-raised fish and regulations and who is in charge of what is a lot to ponder. Since this is 2021, there’s more.

The World Economic Forum is pushing for the Great Reset. And with it, a lot of less great resets, including the food transformation. I did two episodes, one on each, just a few weeks ago.

The Great Reset relies upon accepting many of their claims as fact and acting on them in the direction they determine is correct. Climate change as a fact is one of their positions. From that stance the WEF offers this, “Climate change could wipe out 60% of all fish species, new research suggests.”[20] That’s a scary thing to read.

The WEF also has more than a few pages about aquaculture, how it is a boon. I think it is a boon. As systems get better and production improves, prices will come down and products will increase. The solution is aquaculture. The problem, possibly, is the WEF will determine who is to be in the aquaculture business, just as it will determine who is in the plant-based protein business. When it picks the winners, it also picks the losers.

It may sound fantastic to hear the WEF dares plan the food distribution system. I’ve already done that episode, but I want to remind you that they are treating the vanquishing of the virus as a war. To that end, posts and articles read of terror and despair and a proverbial call to arms.

“Jared Diamond, the author of “Lessons From A Pandemic,” identifies 4 threats to mankind, Nuclear bombs, climate change, “unsustainable use of essential resources” and standard of living inequality. Diamond identifies the essential resources as “forests, seafood, topsoil, and fresh water.” He ends his article with this, “Until the unprecedented danger posed by Covid-19, there has never been a struggle that united all peoples of the world against a widely acknowledged common enemy.”[21]

This is, first, an episode about knowing about the fish and seafood you eat. And I didn’t even get oysters and mussels. In the US the Plains states might be a tough go for wild-caught ocean fish. Closer to the water look for signs reading US caught. If you can find them, a shrimp called Hoppers might just be the best. If you are near enough to a coast to have a fishmonger, chat him up. Do they own their own boats? Learn when their fish comes in. ask the grocery store clerk where the fish comes from. Ask the store manager if that clerk doesn’t know. Expecting more from your grocery store just might get you more.

[1] https://www.fau.edu/hboi/aquaculture/

[2] https://www.forestpeoples.org/topics/shrimp-farming-coastal-forests/news/2010/11/global-shrimp-network-meeting-khulna-bangladesh-f

[3] http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/06/shrimp-safety/index.htm

[4] https://www.foodpolicy.umn.edu/policy-summaries-and-analyses/antimicrobial-residues-farmed-shrimp

[5] https://oceana.org/blog/5-facts-will-make-you-think-twice-about-eating-imported-farm-raised-shrimp

[6] https://oceana.org/blog/5-facts-will-make-you-think-twice-about-eating-imported-farm-raised-shrimp

[7] https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/feeds-aquaculture

[8] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/wild-vs-farmed-salmon#antibiotics

[9] https://www.onemedical.com/blog/eat-well/farmed-salmon

[10] https://sentientmedia.org/farmed-salmon/

[11] https://oceana.org/blog/record-antibiotic-use-concerns-mount-chile%E2%80%99s-salmon-farms-are-brewing-superbugs

[12] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-48266480

[13] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-48266480

[14] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-48266480

[15] https://www.livescience.com/4862-breeding-overfished-bluefin-tuna.html

[16] https://www.livescience.com/4862-breeding-overfished-bluefin-tuna.html

[17] https://www.livescience.com/4862-breeding-overfished-bluefin-tuna.html

[18] https://www.foodandpower.net/latest/2020/04/09/usda-continues-to-lift-meat-processing-line-speed-limits-during-pandemic-threatening-frontline-workers-and-consumers

[19] https://mises.org/library/government-vs-natural-resources

[20] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/climate-change-threatens-60-percent-of-the-world-s-fish-species/

[21] https://www.ft.com/content/71ed9f88-9f5b-11ea-b65d-489c67b0d85d

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