One brilliant Alaskan day a few summers ago, I was sizing up the Kenai River and thinking about putting my kayak in the chilly water. I had driven up from California, paddling some of North America's great rivers along the way—the Skagit in Washington, the Bow in Alberta, and the same Yukon stretch that Jack London worked as a guide during the gold rush. But I hadn't seen anything like this in my travels. It was salmon season, and the fish were running. At the river's wide mouth, where the silty, gray waters emptied into the Pacific Ocean's Cook Inlet, the banks and shallows of the lower Kenai were lined with anglers by the score.
Salmon can be taken in that part of the river only by hand or net. And since most people lack the hand size or speed of a bear's paw, they use a hoop net—a nine-foot pole attached to a huge, netted bag. While I watched, people of all skill levels and walks of life yanked glinting king salmon from the water with little effort. Further upstream, where the water narrows, the spruces and willows grow denser, and people aren't allowed to fish, I would later see eagles and grizzly bears enjoying their share of the bounty. The regular glimpses of salmon being taken by people and animals suggested abundance almost without limits.
During its ocean phase, the royalty of the salmon family sports a sparkling silver coat with areas of blue-green or purple on its back. Once known as June Hogs because of their size and the seasonality of their runs, king salmon routinely used to weigh 80 to 100 pounds as adults and grow to five feet or more in length. But today, kings are lucky to reach half that size. As I later learned, the scenes that I mistook for the animal's abundance in Alaska were in fact images of decline. In fact, the king salmon fishery, like so many others on the planet, is in distress. The annual Alaskan catch of king salmon has fallen by half in the past several decades, and the numbers are even worse in Washington, Oregon, and California.
Beyond the obvious reason for this decline—overfishing—there are additional causes whose connections are harder to fathom. Salmon hatcheries, for example, are intended to help wild salmon populations. So why do hatcheries wind up harming the very species they're trying to help? The answers lie in the supply-driven pressures of meatonomics—which maybe, just for this chapter, we'll call “fishonomics.” In the pages below, I explore these and other questions and suggest solutions to some of fishing's pressing economic problems. It should come as little surprise that these problems are largely about the money—that is, the desire of those who fish industrially or operate commercial fish farms to maximize their profits.
It's instructive to look at another marine animal whose numbers, like those of salmon, are shrinking: the leatherback turtle. The planet's fastest reptile, and the largest one after crocodiles, the leatherback has a ridged back and looks like an art deco spaceship in miniature. This prehistoric creature can grow to nearly ten feet, swim 20 miles per hour, migrate six thousand miles, and dive almost a mile. It's also unique among turtles for its lack of a bony shell, instead sporting a carapace of firm, rubbery skin.
Leatherbacks debuted in the Cretaceous period and have been around for 110 million years. But if things continue as they have for the past few decades, this century could be their last. Leatherback populations have fallen by as much as 95 percent in the past twenty years, and the species is now listed as critically endangered under the Endangered Species Act and international treaties.1 These laws prohibit killing leatherbacks or selling their body parts. Yet despite this protection, tens of thousands of leatherbacks and other threatened or endangered sea turtles are legally killed yearly.
The loophole is a provision that permits what's known as incidental taking. This exception allows fishing enterprises that follow certain guidelines to lawfully kill endangered animals in the normal course of fishing. In federal waters, for example, shrimp trawlers can kill endangered turtles with impunity while fishing—provided they've installed a turtle excluding device (TED) in their nets, which theoretically allows turtles to escape. However, TEDs aren't perfect, and they often fail to save turtles' lives.2 What's more, the use of TEDs is not monitored or enforced well in foreign waters, and they are not even required in many US state waters. Thus, in the Gulf of Mexico, where TEDs are not required, fishing activities in 2010 and 2011 led to an eightfold increase in sea turtle deaths over prior years.3 “One of the greatest threats to sea turtle populations,” notes the UN, “is capture in fishing gear.”4
This massive collateral damage is a consequence of the fish industry's counterpart to land-based CAFOs: factory fishing. Today, more than twenty-three thousand factory ships weighing 100 tons or more patrol the world's oceans, typically staying at sea for weeks at a time and catching and processing huge quantities of fish.5 Two of the most common industrial fishing methods, trawling and longlining, are also among the least discriminate. Trawlers drag a large, open-mouthed net that catches everything in its path. Longliners, by comparison, pull a length of individually baited hooks that trail for fifty miles or more behind the ship, enticing any hungry animal in the vicinity to take a fatal bite. Like trawl nets, longlines snare considerable amounts of unintended haul, or bycatch.
While some countries prohibit discards of certain species, the overwhelming practice is to throw back bycatch dead.6 Thus, in most of the world's oceans, where little attention is paid to bycatch, factory fishing spells trouble for every fish, bird, mammal, or reptile unlucky enough to make contact with the juggernaut of nets or hooks that trail behind ships. Besides endangered turtles, other rare or threatened animals like dolphins and seabirds often die in a net or on a line. The albatross is one of the planet's most threatened creatures, with seventeen of twenty-two albatross species considered vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered under international standards (the other five are labeled “near endangered”).7 One study counted at least forty-four thousand fishing-related albatross deaths in southern oceans each year, with researchers concluding that longlining was causing “serious declines in albatross populations.”8
According to the latest estimate, the amount of marine life killed each year as bycatch is a stunning 40 percent of the total worldwide intended catch.9 That's almost 200 million pounds of nontarget, dead animals each day, or 10,000 pounds in the time it took you to read this sentence.10 Whether you love seafood and eat it regularly or never touch the stuff, this arbitrary waste of life just reeks. As the authors of a 2009 study noted, bycatch is “one of the most significant nature conservation issues in the world today.”11 But even these massive figures don't tell the full story, as the bycatch ratios are much higher in certain regions or in connection with certain target species. Flatfish trawling in Alaska generates two pounds of bycatch for each pound of target fish.12 Shrimp trawling in the Gulf of Mexico generates 10 pounds of bycatch for each pound of shrimp.13 Further, the issues extend beyond the long shadow of dead animals trailing each plate of shrimp scampi or baked cod. Bycatch generates huge economic costs as well.
The hidden price of bycatch stems mainly from two problems: loss of juveniles of the target species and destruction of nontarget fish with commercial value. For example, researchers estimate that in the Northeast, eliminating bycatch would double the value of the Gulf of Maine fisheries, or regional fish habitats.14 Another estimate finds that the value of marketable species discarded in the North Sea bottomfish fishery equals the value of fish caught.15 In light of these and similar studies, the UN notes that aggregate annual economic losses resulting from bycatch “run into billions of dollars” and “in many fisheries the losses due to discard mortalities . . . equal or exceed landed catches.”16
The loss of juveniles as bycatch is one of the reasons fisheries deteriorate and become underproductive. Nevertheless, destructive economic forces encourage commercial fishing fleets to keep operating even in overexploited, unprofitable fisheries. The World Bank and UN report that even as the world's fisheries continue to decline, twice the vessels needed for the task continue to pursue the global fishing catch.17 With so many of the world's fisheries losing productivity, why do fishing enterprises keep exploiting them and making them even less profitable? The answer lies in a powerful economic force: fishing subsidies.
Give someone a fish, and you feed him for a day. Subsidize his fishing, and he'll do it for life—whether or not it's sustainable. In the United States, state and federal governments dole out $2.3 billion in handouts to the US fishing industry yearly.18 That is to say, of the $0.59 average per pound collected by US fishers for their catch, $0.28 (or nearly half) is paid by taxpayers.19 Yet the United States is not the only country to subsidize its fishing industry, and we're not nearly the most generous. Worldwide fishing subsidies total more than $25 billion, with Japan and China paying the most at $4.6 billion and $4.1 billion, respectively.20
Because fishing subsidies artificially reduce production costs, they encourage people to fish even in overexploited and unproductive fisheries. The World Bank and the UN say these incentives, which they condemn as “perverse,” cost the fishing industry $51 billion yearly by diminishing the productivity of the world's oceans.21 Subsidies also contribute to the collapse (that is, the decline by more than 90 percent) of many of the world's fisheries. Worldwide, humans have caused nearly one-third of fished species to collapse.22 Without aggressive intervention, experts say, this trend will lead to the global ruin of all fished species by the middle of this century.23
When a regional fish population collapses, it not only idles humans employed in the local fishing sector, but it also disrupts the local marine ecosystem. “The least movement is of importance to all nature,” remarked the polymath Blaise Pascal centuries ago. “The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.” Research shows that the loss of biodiversity caused by one marine species's collapse makes it more likely that other species in the ecosystem will go bust.24 It's a classic domino effect. A collapsed fishery typically leads to reduced populations of larger fish, marine mammals, and seabirds, and the loss of competition can cause an increase in populations of less marketable species like jellyfish.
A fishery's disintegration can also lead to bizarre and unexpected human responses. Commercial fishing extracted mountains of valuable cod from the North Atlantic for more than a century, taking well over a billion pounds in some years.25 When overfishing led to the cod fishery's collapse in 1992, Canada reacted by banning cod fishing in the North Atlantic. Practically overnight, thirty-five thousand Newfoundland fishing workers lost their jobs.26 The ban was unpopular, to say the least, especially among Newfoundlanders, and according to some commentators, the government needed a scapegoat.
Canada had formerly banned the hunting of another threatened species, the harp seal. While up to 9 percent of a typical harp seal's diet can consist of cod, the seal also helps the cod population by eating larger fish that prey on cod, like halibut, and accordingly is thought to have little overall effect on cod populations.27 Nevertheless, several members of the Canadian government publicly blamed the harp seal for the cod fishery's collapse. In 1995, under the direction of Newfoundlander Brian Tobin, Canada's minister of fisheries and oceans, the country lifted the seal hunting ban. Canada now hosts the largest marine mammal hunt in the world, with an annual quota of 330,000 harp seals.
Three billion people around the globe regularly eat what the French call, in something of a naïve misnomer, “fruits of the sea.” As output from the planet's wild fisheries drops like a barometer before a storm, aquaculture—or fish farming—is increasingly taking up the slack. That makes it the planet's fastest growing food production system, and today, half the fish Americans eat is raised in tanks, cages, and other confinement systems.28 Many believe aquaculture is a sustainable, cost-effective way to feed the planet, especially as the production of meat and dairy is increasingly seen as unsustainable at the levels the world demands. Is fish farming the way of the future?
Recall the Polyface Farm model for land animals. The technique of ecological rotation for farming livestock is one of the most sustainable ways (even if not completely sustainable) to feed animals, manage waste, and avoid degrading the land. In a similar vein, innovative fish farming methods surround the target species with a mini-ecosystem to promote natural waste management. Salmon, for example, might be raised next to shellfish, which filter solid waste, and seaweed, which processes nitrogen. One such efficient system is called Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA), and it's in use today at several aquatic farms in Canada's Bay of Fundy. IMTA isn't perfect, but it does help address one of the biggest concerns in fish farming—the effects of fish waste on surrounding ecosystems.
But waste is only one of several issues in aquaculture sustainability. In fact, the most eco-friendly way to raise fish is to grow them in land-based tanks or ponds where waste is completely contained, disease is minimal, and escapes are impossible. However, unlike open-water systems, land-based systems require costly processes to remove waste and to maintain water's salinity, temperature, and oxygen content.
Fish-farming scientists at the University of Maryland have sought to address the ecological limitations of fish farming. Led by Yonathan Zohar, chair of the university's Department of Marine Biotechnology, the group has developed a fully self-contained, land-based aquaculture system. The Maryland system uses bacteria to filter nitrogen from the water and microbes to convert waste to methane for use as a biofuel. It's about as eco-friendly as fish farming can be. However, it's not ready for production—and may never be. Not surprisingly, this system is limited by its high operating costs and the huge amounts of energy needed to run it.
Aquaculture methods like IMTA and the Maryland system are promising. But just as Polyface Farm is well-intentioned but ultimately unsustainable, these and other innovative fish farming methods also fall short. For starters, land-based systems, even those that don't take the costly extra step of recycling water and waste, are expensive. In a cage or pen system, by contrast, because the permeable container sits in open water, operators spend nothing to dispose of waste or to provide a constant supply of clean, oxygenated water. This fundamental difference allows cage and pen systems to operate much more cheaply than land-based systems. It also explains why cage aquaculture is the predominant method of fish farming throughout the world.29
IMTA, for its part, may be an effective way to protect ecosystems from fish waste. However, IMTA doesn't address a number of other ecological concerns associated with open-water fish farming discussed below. And even if they did, IMTA and similar systems are in use at only a handful of fish farms. The reality is that fish farm operators, like any business owners, look to the bottom line—and we know that price tags are closely watched in the world of meatonomics. That's why inexpensive cage-based systems are the standard. And as experience shows with largely futile efforts to reform land-based animal production methods, in an industry characterized by regulatory capture and heavy influence over lawmaking, it's likely to stay that way. Hence, in evaluating fish farming, while the experiments of innovators on the fringe are interesting, the relevant point of inquiry is the system as it exists today and is likely to persist in the future. And here's where the water gets a bit murky. Considering the many documented environmental impacts of aquaculture as practiced today in North America and around the world, the claim that it's sustainable emerges as something of a fish story.
Fish farms are the factory farms of the sea. And just like CAFOs, aquaculture relies on hyper-confinement to raise the largest number of animals in the smallest possible area. With two-thirds of the planet covered in water, it might not be necessary to stock fish as densely as battery hens. But necessary or not, that's how it's done. Foot-long trout, for example, are raised in densities as tight as twenty-seven to a bathtub-sized space.30 And just as such tight densities cause problems in factory farms, they cause a variety of issues in fish farms.
Fish are susceptible to parasites. While these vermin can only achieve infestation at high density levels, a typical fish farm provides the Goldilocks-like stocking levels they need.31 Atlantic salmon, the most common cage-reared fish, are particularly prone to sea lice. A parasitic crustacean measuring an inch or longer and resembling a miniature horseshoe crab, these dogged little creatures eat the blood, mucus, and tissue of living salmon. Because sea lice can only survive in saltwater, they typically drop off in the wild as their hosts migrate into fresh water. In saltwater fish farms, however, lice remain attached until removed by chemicals or, in some cases, gobbled by lice-eating cleaner fish.
A female sea louse lays up to twenty-two thousand eggs during her seven-month lifespan.32 On tightly packed fish farms, newly hatched juvenile lice have little trouble finding a host to chew on. Picture, if you will, the huge numbers of concentrated salmon and egg-laying sea lice in a typical fish farm environment. With more than five hundred thousand salmon in an average farm, if just one in ten fish hosts just one female louse, and each louse lays just half her capacity, that's a localized plague of more than 500 million baby sea lice. Besides hurting farmed fish, these infestations also harm the surrounding ecosystem and its inhabitants. Like a swarm of tiny locusts, the hungry parasites explode into their surroundings and snack on any wild salmon in the vicinity.
Not surprisingly, sea lice from salmon farms are killing wild salmon populations.33 On Canada's Pacific coast, for example, sea lice infestations are responsible for mass kill-offs of pink salmon that have destroyed 80 percent of the fish in some local populations.34 But the damage doesn't end there, because eagles, bears, orcas, and other predators depend on salmon for their existence. Drops in wild salmon numbers cause these species to decline as well.35
Some farmers respond to lice by dosing the water with concentrated chemicals that kill the tiny creatures. Not surprisingly, adding toxins to the ocean harms the local ecosystem.36 One study, for example, found that cypermethrin (used to kill lice on salmon) kills a variety of nontarget marine invertebrates, travels up to half a mile, and persists in the water for hours.37
But even more threatening to local ecosystems than sea lice and the chemicals that kill them are the massive quantities of waste generated by most fish farms. Consider aquaculture's effect in Scotland. In 2000, Scotland's fish farm industry created as much waste-based nitrogen as did two-thirds of the country's human population of 5 million—plus almost double the phosphorus that the human population generated.38 Fish waste typically falls as sediment to the seabed in sufficient quantities to overwhelm and kill underlying marine life in the immediate vicinity and for some distance beyond. It also promotes algal growth, or the ironically named process of eutrophication (literally, “providing nourishment”), which reduces water's oxygen content and makes it less capable of supporting life. In 2008, the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection shut down two fish farms in the Red Sea that produced 2,000 tons of fish annually, because research showed that eutrophication from the fish farms was damaging the region's coral reefs.
Aquaculture also results in regular escapes by farmed fish into the world's oceans. In the North Atlantic region alone, up to 2 million runaway salmon escape into the wild each year.39 The result is that at least 20 percent of supposedly wild salmon caught in the North Atlantic are of farmed origin.40 Escaped fish breed with wild fish and compromise the gene pool, harming the wild population. Embryonic hybrid salmon, for example, are far less viable than their wild counterparts, and adult hybrid salmon routinely die earlier than their purebred relatives.41 Like hitting a fighter when he's already down, this gene-pool degradation causes further declines in wild fish stocks that have already been pounded by overfishing.
Another direct and unfortunate consequence of aquaculture is overfishing—the practice of capturing more fish than a fishery can regularly replace. Throughout the world, as fish farming explodes to meet surging demand, industrial fishing operations catch prey fish like anchovies, herring, and mackerel in increasing numbers to feed to captive fish. The top ten farmed fish consume an average of 2 pounds of wild fish for each pound they weigh at slaughter. The ratio is even higher for strictly carnivorous fish like salmon and tuna, which eat up to 5 pounds of wild fish per pound raised.42
The aquaculture industry's voracious appetite means that prey may soon join predators in the lists of overexploited and threatened fish stocks. Seven of the world's top ten fisheries are prey fish, with today's total catch in this category exceeding that of 1950 by a factor of four.43 Most of the millions of tons of prey fish caught each year are consumed by aquaculture—the latest data show that farmed fish eat between 50 and 80 percent of all prey fish captured.44 (Nearly all of the rest, by the way, is fed to pigs and chickens in factory farms.)
But wild animals have to eat too, and thousands of species depend on these little marine creatures. As stocks of prey fish decline, predator populations deteriorate in lockstep. In 2009, the nonprofit group Oceana released a report titled “Hungry Oceans,” which highlighted the problem of dwindling predator populations. The report blames the depletion of prey fish stocks for declines in whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions, tuna, bass, salmon, albatross, penguins, and other species.45 “We have caught all the big fish and now we are going after their food,” said Margot Stiles, lead author of the Oceana report. The result, said Stiles, is “widespread malnutrition” in the oceans.46 The main force behind this crisis, according to the report, is aquaculture's need for feed.
One way to reduce the quantity of fish used as feed in aquaculture is to raise herbivorous fish like tilapia. Unlike salmon, tilapia can thrive on pellets of corn or other grains. However, tilapia raised on this unnatural diet provide low levels of the omega-3 fatty acids that many people consider one of the main benefits of eating fish. That's because omega-3s originate in aquatic plants and are found in fish that eat those plants, but are not present in land-cultivated feeds. As a result, 3 ounces of farmed salmon typically contain more than 2,000 milligrams of omega-3s, while the same portion of farmed tilapia contains only 135 milligrams.47 Moreover, research shows that farmed tilapia contains fatty acids at levels which increase the risk of heart disease. A 2008 paper published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that omega-6 fatty acid levels in farmed tilapia were “so high they can be considered detrimental.”48 Another problem with tilapia is the African fish's propensity to invade lakes and displace native species through aggressive feeding and breeding. In fact, escapes from a tilapia farming operation in Lake Nicaragua, the largest lake in Central America, are blamed for the disappearance of the lake's less aggressive species like rainbow bass.49 The upshot is even if tilapia might take some pressure off diminishing prey fish populations, the downside is considerable.
Yet perhaps the most surprising way that fish farms affect wild fisheries is through an economic phenomenon known as the Jevons paradox. William Jevons was a 19th-century economist who noted that as better technology made coal-burning equipment like steam engines more efficient, demand for coal counterintuitively rose instead of falling. That's because efficiency improvements lead to economic expansion and higher commodity sales, negating the effects of any efficiency per unit produced. Similarly, critics argue, as aquaculture makes fish production increasingly efficient, and fish becomes more widely available and less expensive, demand for fish increases across the board. This of course drives more fishing, which hurts wild populations.
Can higher production efficiency really spur greater demand for fish? Consider the change in worldwide salmon production and demand from 1987 to 1999. During this period, salmon hatcheries widely replaced natural salmon spawning areas lost to habitat destruction. As the result of lower prices and wider availability, world demand for salmon increased more than fourfold during this period.50 Although hatcheries were expected to ease the pressure on wild salmon populations, the increased demand they caused actually aggravated the pressure.51 Such supply-driven effects are common around the world, as increased availability and lower production costs—fueled by subsidies and industrial methods of fishing and fish farming—help lower prices and spur consumption.52
The pressure on wild populations, the prevalence of parasites and disease, the lopsided input-output ratios, and the high levels of concentrated waste and chemicals all suggest aquaculture is hard-pressed to deliver on its promise to feed the world sustainably. In fact, these problems have led a number of scientists to condemn fish farming as irresponsible.53 One group of researchers, for example, analyzed the practice of farming salmon and trout in Sweden's coastal waters. Taking into account its large externalized costs, the researchers concluded the system “is not only ecologically but also economically unsustainable.”54 Another team of scientists concluded that pen farming in China is an “economically irrational choice from the perspective of the whole society, with an unequal tradeoff between environmental costs and economic benefits.”55 Throw in the ethical issues associated with fish farming discussed in chapter 8, and it's evident that cage aquaculture—the world's predominant fish farming system—presents as many problems as land-based factory farming.
Conceivably, fish farming could be ecologically fixed by containing and greening it like at the University of Maryland. But as we've already seen, its high costs make this model commercially unviable. Just like CAFO operators, industrial fish farmers seek a regulatory framework that lets them externalize as much of their costs as possible. And they seek to operate in a way that complies with that framework at a minimum of expense. Can you blame them? Like most business owners, they're in it to make money—not to save the planet.
Around the world, regulation of fish farming is spotty and inconsistent. Since 95 percent of the farmed fish that Americans eat is imported, mostly from lesser-regulated regions like China and South America, most Americans who eat fish unwittingly skirt our own regulatory system. Jeffrey McCrary is an American fish biologist who has spent ten years studying how a small tilapia farm degraded Lake Apoyo in Nicaragua. “One small cage screwed up the entire lake—the entire lake!” McCrary said in a 2011 interview with the New York Times. “We wouldn't allow tilapia to be farmed in the United States the way they are farmed here,” McCrary said, “so why are we willing to eat them? We are exporting the environmental damage caused by our appetites.”56
The United States has, so far, trailed the rest of the world in aquaculture production. Half the fish we eat is farmed, but only 5 percent is raised here. But times are changing, and the federal government is starting to push fish farming almost as vigorously as it markets milk and meat. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) urges, in a special area of its website dedicated to aquaculture, “A compelling case can be made for growing more seafood in the United States.” That's because, among other things:
The $1 billion value of total U.S. aquaculture production (freshwater and marine) pales in comparison to the $100 billion value of world aquaculture production. According to the latest information from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the United States ranks 13th in total aquaculture production.57
With this kind of government agenda, the United States certainly seems well-poised to improve its standing in the global farmed fish market. Of course, this prognosis should give you flashbacks to earlier chapters on land-based animal farming because, with little doubt, the producers who lead the charge will seek to dump most of their production costs on the rest of us.
As with other methods of raising animals for food, fish production heaps huge external costs on society. Fishing's advocates say it provides jobs and benefits the world economy, but the UN begs to differ. In light of subsidies and other problems discussed already, the UN says, “Global marine fisheries . . . represent a net economic loss to society.”58
Consider the externalized costs of aquaculture, which experts find can range from 20 percent to more than 100 percent of the value of a fish farm's output.59 There are no published estimates of fish farming's external costs in the United States, but because research finds these costs often equal the value of fish produced, aquaculture's external costs can be conservatively pegged at half the total value of production, or $650 million yearly.60 However, those are just the US costs. Since we import 95 percent of our farmed fish, almost all of the external costs of production are imposed on other countries.
Then there are the costs of overfishing. Recent research published by a team of experts suggests that overfishing in North America leads to losses of about 30 percent of the actual catch.61 Applying this estimate to the portion of total US landings ($4.8 billion) indicates that the annual US cost of overfishing is about $1.4 billion.62 But again, this figure neglects the imported fish Americans consume. Also, this limited estimate fails to account for hundreds of nontarget species deprived of food, most of which have no recognized economic value, whose numbers are dropping around the world as overfishing starves them out of existence.
Finally, there are the costs of bycatch. As we've seen, research shows that bycatch losses often equal the value of the total landed catch. While there are no definitive figures for the United States, the costs of US bycatch losses can be roughly estimated at half our commercial landings of $4.8 billion—that is, $2.4 billion.63
CHART 8.1 Annual Externalized Costs of US Fish Production (in billions of dollars)
The $4.5 billion in estimated externalized costs of US fishing activities amounts to more than 70 percent of the US fishing system's total output of $6.1 billion.64 Oddly, compared to the hundreds of billions in costs that land-based animal agriculture generates, this doesn't sound like much. And in fact, because this figure is limited to US costs, it's deceptively small. But then, most of the external costs of producing fish for American consumption are imposed on people outside the United States.
There are other significant, but unavoidable, omissions from this estimate. Oceans supply a variety of indispensable ecosystem services to the planet—life-support systems that keep humans and other animals alive and fed. Among others, these include filtering services that keep water clean and nursery habitat services that provide important areas where juveniles can develop (such as wetlands, oyster reefs, and sea grass beds). A 1997 study estimated the total value of marine ecosystems services was $21 trillion in 1994 dollars—or $33 trillion today.65 To put this in perspective, US GDP—the highest in the world—is about $15 trillion.
Because of the interconnectedness of species in an ecosystem, when ocean biodiversity declines, a marine ecosystem's ability to provide these valuable services also falls. Since 1800, as human activity has reduced marine biodiversity, filtering and nursery habitat functions have each fallen by more than 60 percent.66 The economic costs of drops caused by fishing in these and other ecosystem services have not yet been measured. But when these costs are calculated, and presumably someday they will be, they could easily measure an order of magnitude more than the $4.5 billion we can calculate today.
Is the supply-driven focus on ramping up fish production misplaced? Fishers and fish farmers are decimating the world's oceans to catch or raise fish in ever greater quantities, but the planet's fisheries should now be exploited less, not more, if they are to recover and heal. And the evidence shows that fish farming—that reputed paragon of food production—just makes things worse. Among other failures, we've seen that aquaculture causes many of the same environmental problems as factory farming. Further, aquaculture's practice of robbing Peter to pay Paul—overexploiting little fish to feed bigger ones—just ratchets up the pressure on depleted fisheries and threatened species.
Given the earth's limited resources, maybe the answer to the fishing question isn't to crank up supply—but rather to turn down demand. As with meat and dairy, demand for fish has been artificially inflated by economic forces, and the world simply doesn't need to eat fish at these—or any—levels. One important path toward restoring true market equilibrium is to eliminate fishing subsidies in the United States and around the world. And on a personal level, you might consider replacing some or all of the seafood in your own diet with plant-based proteins. Omega-3s are readily found in a variety of vegetable sources—including flax, hemp, soy, and walnuts. And unlike virtually all fish, these sources don't contain cholesterol, mercury, and PCBs (see Appendix A). Consider the consequences of just giving up shrimp. With the highest bycatch-to-target ratios in the industry, a few plates of foregone prawns could save a dozen other fish from the discard pile.
Some believe the answer is to stop eating seafood altogether. After all, considering the harmful environmental effects of either catching or farming fish, it's sort of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemma. Maybe that's what George W. Bush had in mind in 2000 when he astutely observed, “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”