It’s not often that fish farming is equated with the cell phone, but that’s the analogy Neil Sims, president of Kona Blue Water Farms and the Ocean Stewards Institute, used to explain offshore mariculture’s potential in a recent webinar organized by SeafoodSource.
“At this stage we have to be focused on high value species because we’re still a developing technology,” said Sims, explaining why salmon and his company’s own Kona Kampachi are currently the norm in fish farms. “We are where cell phones were in the mid to late ‘80s. Cell phones were very expensive and didn’t always work perfectly and were for only those who really could afford them, the very higher end of the market.”
But the cell phone’s potential to take over the world was there. Likewise, the future potential of offshore fish farming is huge, Sims said. Once the kinks are worked out, and farms can scale up their operations, Sims believes the industry will be able to reduce pressure on wild stocks, provide the world with large quantities of inexpensive species of oily fish with their valuable omega-3 fatty acids, and follow in the global game-changing footsteps of the cell phone.
“We need to be framing this question not as, ‘Should we allow open ocean mariculture to happen?’ But, my lord, we have to make this happen. It’s an imperative,” Sims said.
The SeafoodSource webinar posed the question to a panel of quests: What’s preventing open-ocean aquaculture from reaching its potential? Besides Sims, the panel included David Tze, managing director of Aquacopia, a New York-based investment firm focused on the aquaculture industry; Steve Page, owner of Ocean Farm Technologies, a Maine-based firm specializing in the design and production of open ocean aquaculture equipment; and Scott Lindell, director of the Marine Biological Laboratory’s scientific aquaculture program in Woods Hole, Mass., which recently set up four experimental blue mussel farms off the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
The panelists discussed many of the common misconceptions people have about aquaculture, the National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Act introduced last December by U.S. Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.), the need for a working regulatory framework for permitting fish farms in federal waters, which fish species are best suited for farming, how to attract the investment community and if fish farming raises serious environmental concerns.
Given the state of wild fish stocks and the assumption they can’t sustain more fishing pressure, aquaculture is seen as a way to provide protein-rich fish for human consumption.
In 2009, for the first time, aquaculture provided 50 percent of the seafood consumed worldwide, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. David Tze said it’s likely that number will increase to close to 70 percent within the next few decades.
But the United States is far behind in the farming of seafood. Currently, the United States consists of 1.5 percent of global aquaculture production, while more than 70 percent of farmed seafood comes from China.
If the industry is going to scale up to increase the amount of farmed seafood, proponents say moving to the deep recesses of the open ocean is the only solution. Mariculture “has tremendous theoretical room for growth,” Tze said.
The panelists agreed the U.S. offshore mariculture industry has an opportunity to lead the global seafood industry, but that several things, including a working regulatory framework, need to fall into place before that can occur.
On the other hand, if the United States doesn’t create an environment that fosters innovation within the industry, and fish farmers are left to stagnate, offshore mariculture will still move ahead, just in waters elsewhere, with fewer environmental regulations, Sims said.
“If it happens in Chile or China, it may not be held to the same rigorous standards that we would like to see, but it’s still going to happen,” he explained. “And guess what? It really is all one ocean and sooner or later that stuff is going to wash up on our shores.”
To purchase the SeafoodSource webinar on open-ocean aquculture, click here.
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