October 27, 2014 — You can find signs of the increasing availability of organic food all across the grocery store—from the organic beef at the butcher counter to the organic apples in the produce section. Still, the booming sector, which has climbed from around $20 billion in sales in 2008 to an estimated $35 billion this year, has yet to touch every aisle. Consumers looking for certified organic seafood, for example, are perpetually disappointed—because it doesn't exist. The United States Department of Agriculture has yet to establish the standards for domestic seafood raised organically.
That could change as early as next year, when the USDA’s National Organic Program is expected to finalize an organic standard for seafood. Some organic advocacy groups, however, believe that while an organic label for fish is absolutely necessary, it should not apply to seafood raised in ocean-based farms. That’s the gist of a 44-page report released last week by the Center for Food Safety—Like Water and Oil: Ocean-Based Fish Farming and Organic Don't Mix—which asserts that aquaculture endangers both the environment and human health.
“Organic in the U.S. gets its brand and value from integrity,” says Dr. Lisa Bunin, organic policy director at the CFS and the report’s coauthor. “That’s what consumers want—the gold standard of the United States organic seal. We don’t want products that use less rigorous standards in the U.S. That, in our view, tarnishes the value of organic.”
Americans eat more fish than any other nation on Earth—nearly 16 pounds of seafood per person annually. Farmed seafood has boomed in the last decade, countering the decline of wild fish stocks that have been depleted by overfishing and the effects of climate change.
But Bunin says that because ocean-based aquaculture exists within a vast ecological system and cannot be contained the same way, say, an organic tomato farm can, it can never meet U.S. organic standards. Sea water flows in and out of these farms, and Bunin suggests fish farmers are not monitoring any contamination coming into the system from the larger ocean. Similarly, waste, feces, and unused food flow out of the fish farms, “altering the aquatic ecology, changing [wild] fish’s behavior, and changing the food that [wild] fish eat,” she says. Furthermore, migratory fish, such as salmon, cannot be farmed organically, the report asserts, because “their confinement in fish farms would curtail their need to swim far distances, causing stress” and undermining the organic principles of animal welfare. The report also documents international instances of fish escaping from farming systems, a problem Bunin and others say results in the spread of parasites from farmed salmon to wild stocks and changes in the wild salmon gene pools.
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