D.C. must stand with SoCal fishermen in fight against fish farms
D.C. must stand with SoCal fishermen in fight against fish farms
D.C. must stand with SoCal fishermen in fight against industrial fish farms
When you fish in the Santa Barbara Channel every day you get a sense of everything that’s there: the stoic northern Channel Islands, migrating humpback whales, and countless rockfish that are sold to make a living. You also get a sense of what doesn’t belong, and massive finfish farms directly off the coast of Ventura do not belong in our waters.
Offshore finfish aquaculture is a type of factory farming that uses massive net pens to raise fish in tight quarters. This allows disease and pests such as sea lice to spread rapidly which, if the fish escape, can be devastating to local fish populations. These cages also allow excess feed, untreated fish waste, antibiotics, and other chemicals to flow into the surrounding ocean where they can wreak havoc on our marine ecosystem and contribute to toxic algal blooms.
A federal agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has selected the waters off of Southern California as prime sites for industrial fish farming. As advocates and representatives for California’s fishermen, we know how harmful these massive ocean developments would be for our waters, our marine ecosystems, and our fishermen’s ability to sell their catch at fair market price. Imagine waking up at 4 a.m. every morning to spend the day fishing, avoiding the giant fish pens and their resulting pollution in the process, only to have the price of your labor undercut by companies who are factory farming fish. That is the future we’re trying to avoid.
When farmed fish are sold in the U.S., they can kneecap wild fisheries and drive small fishing businesses into closure. The impact of global salmon farming on small-boat salmon fishermen in Alaska during the 1990s is a textbook example — it caused massive economic insecurity and job loss in small fishing communities across the state.
In the spring of 2022, NOAA identified 10 Aquaculture Opportunity Areas (AOAs), or ideal aquaculture sites, off the coast of Southern California. And eight of the ten are directly in the backyard of Ventura County. Officially identifying these areas opens the floodgates for corporations to grab the shared public resource of the Pacific Ocean and use it for profits — in the process hurting a wide swath of people.
Last year, over 175 fishing associations, food groups, environmental organizations and coastal businesses delivered an open letter to the White House, urging President Biden to revoke a Trump-era Executive Order that mandated the creation of these AOAs. The Executive Order streamlined the process for corporations to obtain industrial fish farm permits, without examining the environmental impacts on our oceans or economic impacts on our coastal communities. We stand with those groups and hundreds of fishermen of the Central Coast by urging the Biden Administration to rescind the Executive Order that promotes these developments.
After long stretches of overfishing and other harmful practices, we have finally gotten it right in California. Today, the fish populations off our coast are among the best managed in the world and are back to healthy levels some 50 years ahead of schedule. Because of this, fishermen of all kinds can once again make a decent, dignified living off the ocean and a new generation of fishermen can take the helm. Years of restorative work must not be jeopardized.
When fish farms come to our communities it’s the smallest fishermen, in addition to humpback whales, and, of course, the fish themselves, that are irrevocably harmed. These corporations might claim that this is simply the most efficient way to sell fish in the 21st century, but it’s really the most efficient way to push local fishermen out of the market and pad the pockets of mega-corporations.
We believe that the benefits our coastal fishing, recreation, and hospitality businesses reap from our ocean should be reinvested in our local economy to allow future generations, and the ocean itself, to flourish. We deserve a bold agenda that supports coastal communities and affirms once and for all that California’s oceans are not for sale. President Biden must rescind the Trump-era Executive Order and stand with the fishermen of Southern California.
Eric Hodge is a small-scale commercial fisherman who lives in Ventura County and Jake Schwartz is an organizer for Don’t Cage Our Oceans.
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