“Calling fish farming a potential boon for consumers and the economy,” reports the Seattle PI, “the Bush administration yesterday proposed to massively expand the practice to waters as far as 200 miles offshore.”


“It’s the equivalent of having a hog farm in a city park flushing its wastes into the street,” said Anne Mosness, a “crusader for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.”

Mosness, who fished for salmon in Alaska for 28 years, worries that producing enough salmon in fish farms will give politicians an excuse to discontinue environmental-protection efforts designed to make Northwest rivers more welcoming to salmon.


More, including the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico:

Supporters in Washington, including a state senator who advocates for fish farmers, urged Congress to bless the idea. They said a likely result — if fish-culturing methods can be perfected — would be a cheap source of ocean-grown delights, such as black cod, in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Critics answered that the aquaculture build-up is a get-rich-quick scheme destined to leave taxpayers subsidizing an industry that would pollute the ocean, serve up substandard fish and, ultimately, center its economic activity in Third World nations.

“The Gulf of Mexico is widely viewed as the most readily exploitable U.S. waters from a commercial standpoint,” reports the Seattle PI, “because the Gulf is relatively shallow and fish tend to grow bigger faster in warm waters.”


My quick take on that bright idea: It’s nuts.


What about the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico — the size of New Jersey, reports the National Geographic:

Each year a swath of the Gulf of Mexico becomes so devoid of shrimp, fish, and other marine life that it is known as the dead zone.


Scientists have identified agricultural fertilizers as a primary culprit behind the phenomenon. Researchers are now focusing on shrinking the zone.


Dave Whitall is a coastal ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment in Silver Spring, Maryland. He said the dead zone forms each April and lasts through the summer, adding that the zone “generally grows throughout the summer, reaching a peak in late July.”


At its peak, the nearly lifeless water can span 5,000 to 8,000-plus square miles (13,000 to 21,000 square kilometers), an area almost the size of New Jersey.


The dead zone is the result of oxygen-depleted water. Fish, shrimp, and all other marine organisms that require oxygen to survive either flee the zone or die.


Whitall says the phenomenon is triggered by excess nutrients in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River Basins. Streaming into the Gulf of Mexico along the Louisiana coast, the rivers drain about 40 percent of all U.S. land area and account for nearly 90 percent of the freshwater runoff into the Gulf. …

FarmedAndDangerous.org has more on the controversy.

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