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Fish Farms In The Gulf Of Mexico Are A No-Go

Hawaiian Kanpachi in open ocean net pen off Kona coast.
Photo courtesy of Blue Ocean Mariculture via NOAA.
Hawaiian Kanpachi in open ocean net pen off Kona coast.

Huge floating fish farms in the Gulf of Mexico? Plans were in the works, until this week.

The federal government has lost a lawsuit filed by a coalition of environmental groups.

New Orleans Public Radio talked with Marianne Cufone, director of the Recirculating Farms Coalition and the environmental program at the Loyola University College of Law, and a party in the suit.

Tegan Wendland: The idea here is that NOAA would permit and regulate floating fish farms in the Gulf of Mexico and companies would apply for permits, and then install net pens and raise anything from red drum to cobia. The government described it as a way to produce more fish and compete with cheap foreign imports, which sounds great — cheap protein, expanding farming in the ocean. So why did you take such a strong stance against this?

Marianne Cufone:Well, offshore ocean fish farming actually wouldn't likely do many of those things, because right now we actually export most of our domestic seafood product. So likely what would happen is that those farms would come in and use our public resources for private profit, and bring in other people to do those jobs or automate the systems, then export most of the production for higher dollars. So in the end we wouldn't end up with more than a mess, locally. The other reason is because offshore fish farming globally has been associated with so many problems — things like fish spills and diseases and water quality issues. We don't need that in the United States. So much so that countries like Canada and Denmark are moving away from the application of this method, so we don't need to start that here in the United states.

So if NOAA isn’t technically able to regulate aquaculture in the Gulf, then how did this thing get approved in the first place?

That is a great question. It falls to our regulatory process in the United States. The way things work is that fishery management councils development fishery management plans about any issue, and the National Marine Fisheries Service reviews and approves that. And so essentially what happened is that the plan went through the Gulf Council with support of the National Marine Fisheries Service, and when it got to the approval stage the agency sat on it. The Department of Commerce didn’t do anything, the National Marine Fisheries Service didn’t do anything, and there’s a trigger in the law that if it’s not approved or disapproved in a certain amount of time, it’s automatically approved. So these regulations went in without any action.

Since NOAA made the announcement in 2016, has anyone tried to set up a fish farm in the Gulf?

Right now there’s a permit pending off the coast of Florida called Velella Epsilon — it’s a company from Hawaii.

You ended up suing NOAA with a number of other groups, saying this was federal overreach and you won in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, so what happens next?

Essentially what this decision means is that NOAA and National Marine Fisheries Service can’t permit offshore finfish farming in the Gulf of Mexico. By extension it probably means that they can't do it in other places either because, logically, this is a federal law, and if you can’t do a particular thing under a federal law in one place, probably you can’t do it another either. So this is actually a big win for the Gulf of Mexico, but also for all of us around the United States. We’ll see what happens next. They could appeal it to the Supreme Court of the United States. Hopefully they don't, because they’ve already wasted enough time and money and energy fighting this decision. Hopefully they’ll just move on and allocate resources to support our existing fishing communities and look towards other more modern, sustainable methods of seafood production.

This whole idea of fish farming in the Gulf was supposed to solve some problems — more fresh, affordable food, more business, a way to compete with cheaper imported fish from Asia. Now you’re not just a person who doesn't like industrial fish farming, you also advocate for more sustainable farming and fishing practices through your leadership at Recirculating Farms Coalition. So in your opinion, what might be some better solutions to these problems?

Yeah I definitely am not 100 percent opposed to aquaculture. In fact our organization, Recirculating Farms Coalition, supports responsible sustainable aquaculture. And it would be great if the agency would get more on-board with supporting those methods of seafood production — land-based aquaculture that recirculates water and waste within the system and doesn't pose the type of risk that offshore aquaculture does.

Support for the Coastal Desk comes from the Greater New Orleans Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

Copyright 2021 WWNO - New Orleans Public Radio. To see more, visit .

Tegan Wendland is a freelance producer with a background in investigative news reporting. She currently produces the biweekly segment, Northshore Focus.