Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published September 30, 2018. In this interview, investigative journalist and fishing industry insider Paul Molyneaux discusses aquaculture and the dangers of farmed fish, which are also the topics of his book “Swimming in Circles: Aquaculture and the End of Wild Oceans.”
From my perspective, the two most dangerous foods served in most restaurants are factory farmed chicken, which is responsible for a majority of foodborne illnesses, and farmed fish, especially farmed salmon, which is among the most toxic foods on the planet.
Salmon Farming in Cobscook Bay
At the age of 17, Molyneaux left home and got a job in commercial fishing, which led to work in aquaculture in the late ’70s. “I always had an interest in aquaculture, although I primarily was a commercial fisherman. In the late ’80s, I ran a fish processing plant for the Passamaquoddy tribe in Eastport, Maine, on Cobscook Bay. There was a sudden push to do salmon farming in the bay. The way the promoters — at the time, a company called Ocean Products — sold it to us was [by] saying, ‘You can become farmers of the sea. You can start giving back to the ocean.’ We bought it hook, line and sinker … Last summer, there were about six of us standing on the dock in Eastport, saying, ‘Geez, we thought this was going to be great.'”
As fisheries had dwindled, they believed aquafarming would be the answer to keeping the fishing industry alive. Alas, the industry was rapidly consolidated into the hands of just a few players. “Now, it’s in the hands of one,” Molyneaux says.
What’s worse, it didn’t take long before the environmental downsides of aquaculture became readily apparent as well. In the late 1990s, infectious salmon anemia virus spread like wildfire among the salmon pens in Cobscook Bay, wiping out the fishery as 2 million fish had to be discarded overnight. “That set the industry back. Now, it’s owned by one company — Cooke Aquaculture — and pretty much everything is automated. They have a tremendous sea lice problem. They’re pouring tons of SLICE into those pens, and they’re coming up with new systems now because they’re finding the sea lice medication is now in the mollusks, like the scallops that are also harvested from the bay. Cooke has been fined twice in the last five years for using an illegal chemical, cypermethrin, to fight sea lice.”
Industrialized Food Supply Encouraged Switch to Aquaculture
In his book, Molyneaux reviews the economics of the fishing industry, then and now. Three decades ago, many towns would have local fish markets, which in coastal areas would sell a wide variety of locally caught fish. Virtually all fish markets have now been replaced by chain stores that use computerized systems to maintain a consistent supply of specific fish, and this industrialization really pushed aquaculture forward.
“In dealing with the vagaries of wild fisheries, where maybe today you have one species, tomorrow you have another — ‘Yesterday I caught pollock. Today caught haddock. Then I couldn’t get out because of a storm’ — these companies were going, ‘Oh, geez. We can’t deal with this, but we can deal with farmed salmon. That’s right there, and we can have a schedule of set price.’ Because of the [varying] availability of wild fish, the price varies. These larger companies are saying, ‘Go ahead with that aquaculture, because that’s perfect for us.'”
Aquaculture Destroys Local Wild Fisheries
The most popular seafood in America is shrimp, most of which is farmed in Thailand. One of the things discussed in Molyneaux’s book is the placement of shrimp and salmon production systems, and how that disrupts local economies and destroys the environment. More often than not, aquafarms are imposed in locations where people are desperate for jobs. The farms are basically sold as job opportunity and economic development. Alas, they inevitably end up destroying healthy wild fisheries in those same areas.
“In Eastport, in the late ’80s, we were still catching wild-caught cod and pollock out of skiffs. We were processing those at the Passamaquoddy reservation and shipping them downstate. I shipped to a friend of mine in Rhode Island. He called me up and said, ‘Paul, what’s wrong with these fish? I’ve never seen fish like this before.’ I said, ‘Carter, wait a week and you’ll recognize them, because you’ve never seen fish that fresh before. They’re less than 24 hours out of the water.’ But when the salmon farms came in those wild fish disappeared. And there were high mortalities of lobsters. Why? Because the chemicals they use to fight the sea lice that attack the salmon also destroy the shells of larval lobsters.”
What’s more, aqua farms never take the pollution they create into account when counting the cost of production, and this oversight virtually ensures the business’ demise. Molyneaux predicts virtually all aquaculture operations will eventually go out of business because they’re not factoring in the pollution they’re causing, which eventually ends up decimating the business by promoting rampant disease and destroying the water quality.
“They survive by, basically, robbing the future and coming up with technological rabbits to keep the ball rolling as they cascade down declining ecosystems,” he says. They also stay alive by receiving government subsidies and even bailouts when disease wipes out the entire business all at once. Eventually, however, the water quality will become so poor that fish can no longer be raised there, and the farm must either relocate, go under, or raise prices. When wild fish are all gone those prices may go higher than we can imagine.
“If you look at Saltonstall-Kennedy money, which is research money that’s supposed to help fishermen, the majority of it now goes into aquaculture and finfish aquaculture, figuring out how to grow fish,” Molyneaux says. “It is these kinds of subsidies — not to mention overestimating stock abundance on forage fish so that they can be fished to dangerous levels of overfishing — that keeps this industry going.”
Shrimp Recommendations
As a general rule, most restaurants serve farmed salmon and farmed shrimp, and both are best avoided if you care about your health, the environment and the working conditions of laborers. Exceptions would be specialty restaurants that serve wild-caught Alaskan salmon and wild shrimp.
“I eat Maine shrimp, which is a northern Pandalus borealis,” Molyneaux says. “It’s a transsexual shrimp. It’s born as a male, and then after two years, it turns into a female … which we harvest when they come near shore and drop their eggs … When I’m in Mexico, most of the shrimp I eat I buy from local fishermen … But if I was going to go into a restaurant and buy shrimp, the best shrimp you’re going to get is probably Gulf shrimp or wild shrimp out of Mexico, out of the Sea of Cortez there.”
As for potential contamination from the Gulf oil spill and subsequent use of Corexit, Molyneaux says: “The problem with the government and studies is that they spend a lot of time studying what goes on inside shrimp ponds. They don’t spend much time studying what goes on outside them. If there were problems with the Gulf shrimp in terms of contamination, even the fishermen would be trying to squash that, right? I don’t really know and I can’t really speak to that.”
Theoretically, Land-Based Aquaculture Could Be Sustainable
While most aquafarms are located in open water, land-based operations are becoming more common, especially with the introduction of genetically engineered (GE) salmon, which are not allowed to be raised in open water due to their potentially devastating environmental impact, should they get free. In Belfast, Maine, a company is currently negotiating the purchase of 200 million gallons of aquifer water per year for its land-based aquafarm operation.
Ocean-based operations basically get their water for free, and they don’t even have to pay for cleanup of the pollution they create. Land based companies, on the other hand, are taking valuable drinking water, turning it toxic, and then releasing it into the bay. Theoretically, it could be possible to construct a land-based operation that not only filters water for reuse, but also prevents toxicity in the first place by feeding the fish a natural diet. The reason farmed salmon are so incredibly toxic is…