Oct 27, 2008

Dr. Thomas McIlwain, Chair

The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council
2203 N. Lois Avenue, Suite 1100
Tampa, FL 33607

Submitted via fax to (813) 348-1711 and email to gulfcouncil@gulfcouncil.org.

RE: The Public Hearing Draft Fishery Management Plan for Regulating Offshore Marine
Aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico (Previously the Generic Amendment to the Gulf of Mexico
Fishery Management Council’s Red Drum, Reef Fish, and Stone Crab Fishery Management Plan
and The Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic Fishery Management Councils’ Joint Spiny Lobster
and Coastal Migratory Pelagics Fishery Management Plan)

Chairman McIlwain and Members of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council:

The Marine Fish Conservation Network, a coalition of almost 200 organizations, including
environmental groups, commercial and recreational fishing associations, aquariums, and marine science
organizations, submits the following comments on the Draft Fishery Management Plan (FMP) for
Regulating Offshore Marine Aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Network commented on a previous draft of this proposal in Jun 2008, at which time we urged the
Gulf Council not to proceed with the Generic Aquaculture Amendment and to cease its efforts to
develop a plan to permit and regulate offshore aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico. The Council’s
proposed action has changed significantly since then, evolving from a generic amendment to the existing
FMPs into a full-blown FMP that would be managed and overseen by NMFS and the Council. The
changes to the proposed action envisioned in this DEIS have not addressed our concerns, only increased
them. In our view, the Gulf Council has greatly overstepped its authority under the Magnuson-Stevens
Act by proposing to regulate aquaculture in federal waters as an FMP. Nothing in the MSA gives the
Council the authority to do so, and the DEIS illustrates why the Council is poorly equipped to do so.

As we noted previously, commercial-scale offshore aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico poses substantial
risks to the marine environment and could negatively impact fisheries and fishing communities in many
ways. Few of these risks and threats have been adequately addressed in the current DEIS. Moreover,
there are many unresolved legal and regulatory questions concerning siting and permitting rules, leasing
or royalty fees for use of public resources, monitoring and enforcement requirements, liability for
damage to public trust resources, environmental standards, and socioeconomic impacts which also have
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 MFCN Comments on Public Hearing Draft FMP for Regulating Offshore Marine Aquaculture

not been addressed adequately in this DEIS. Earlier this year the U.S. Government Accountability
Office (GAO) reported that multiple federal agencies currently have the authority to regulate different
aspects of offshore aquaculture under a variety of laws that were not designed for this purpose, 1 and the
Council’s DEIS illustrates the difficulties of attempting to establish an offshore aquaculture management
regime in the absence of clear federal guidelines. We reiterate our strong opinion that it is inappropriate
for the Gulf Council to proceed with this proposed aquaculture initiative in the absence of a national
legal and regulatory framework for sustainable offshore aquaculture. Indeed, the Council’s authority
under the MSA is to manage wild-capture fisheries, not fish farms.

The MSA never contemplated aquaculture as part of the “fisheries” managed by NMFS and the
councils. The lack of correspondence between the Gulf Council’s management objectives for fisheries
under the MSA and management of aquaculture can be seen in the ad hoc attempt to apply FMP
requirements to offshore aquaculture facilities by establishing values for MSY and OY for aquaculture
production in the Gulf of Mexico. The Council’s preferred alternative for aquaculture MSY/OY is 64
million pounds – approximately twice the annual production from fisheries under the Council’s existing
FMPs. The DEIS admits that this OY value is a short-term proxy until more is known about the number,
size and true impacts of operations, but the DEIS clearly envisions that aquaculture has the potential to
result in much greater production than wild fisheries and thus, “If the planned level exceeds the
preferred OY then the Council would initiate review of the OY proxy…and determine whether OY
should be increased or some other action is appropriate” (DEIS, Sec. 4.9, p. 80). The MSA requirement
to achieve OY in wild fisheries has never been applied to the production of cultured fish in cages, and
the DEIS does not demonstrate that the preferred OY has fully or even partially taken into account the
impacts to fishermen, fishing communities, and the marine environment.

Similarly, the DEIS envisions that NMFS would have broad authority to site and permit offshore
aquaculture facilities on a case-by-case basis. But NMFS’s permitting authority under the MSA is
limited to fishing vessels, not aquaculture facilities. The MSA never contemplated that aquaculture
facilities would be treated as equivalent to fishing vessels. The whole purpose of NMFS is to manage
and conserve wild fisheries, not to create a new type of “fishery” based on offshore aquaculture
production. Preferred Alternative 3 gives NMFS full authority to decide where farms can be located and
appears to allow the agency to decide which criteria to apply, on a case-by-case basis. Thus a fish farm
could be sited on a favorite fishing ground, in a marine sanctuary, or adjacent to sensitive fish habitats
designated as habitat areas of particular concern (HAPC). 2

The scale of fish farming in federal waters envisioned in the proposed aquaculture FMP would conflict
with fisheries and fishermen in numerous ways, and the DEIS does not ensure that the interests of
commercial and recreational fisheries will be protected in the process of developing commercial-scale
fish farming.

The DEIS also lacks monitoring requirements based on stringent standards to address pollution and
contaminants released into the surrounding environment from aquaculture facilities. Instead of requiring

1
GAO Report to the Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources, May 2008. Offshore
Marine Aquaculture: Multiple Administrative and Environmental Issues Need to Be Addressed in Establishing a U.S.
Regulatory Framework. GAO-08-594.
2
The DEIS proposes that essential fish habitat designated as HAPC would be off limits to fish farming. However, a
prohibition on fish farms in National Marine Sanctuaries was removed from Preferred Alternative 3.

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 MFCN Comments on Public Hearing Draft FMP for Regulating Offshore Marine Aquaculture

a monitoring program, the Council’s preferred alternative would rely on existing Clean Water Act
pollution controls under the EPA’s jurisdiction. But the CWA does not currently require effluent
monitoring from aquaculture facilities and the existing standards were not created to address large-scale
commercial production from offshore aquaculture facilities. The lack of any meaningful monitoring of
aquaculture effluent or requirements to mitigate those impacts is particularly worrisome given that the
optimal areas for siting of offshore aquaculture facilities are believed to reside in a narrow zone at
depths of 25-100 meters, which would serve to concentrate the impacts and effects of effluents from
offshore fish farms. Although the DEIS proposes that sensitive areas designated as HAPC would be off
limits to fish farming – a position we support – the proposed action does not ensure that the operation of
offshore aquaculture facilities will not result in the loss or degradation of fishing grounds or the
transmission of disease from farmed fish to wild fish in surrounding waters.

Attempts in the 1990s to develop offshore aquaculture facilities on abandoned oil platforms in the Gulf
of Mexico were destroyed by storms, yet the proposed aquaculture FMP does not prohibit the siting of
fish farms on oil and gas platforms and does not appear to provide assurance in the form of a bond or
liability system to insure against catastrophic system failures. There appears to be no liability or cost-
recovery mechanism aimed at addressing disease outbreaks and the spread of disease from farmed fish
to wild fish, or other unforeseen events. The assurance bond required in Section 4.2.3 is only specified
for the removal of all components of facilities at the end of the project’s lifetime. A performance bond
may also be required, but it is unclear if this is intended to cover catastrophic events or would be
sufficient to do so. And there is no provision for leasing or royalty fees to compensate the public for the
use of public resources by private developers.

The plan also lacks limits on the amount of wild fish used as feedstock for farmed fish. Any acceptable
plan to permit offshore aquaculture facilities should include limitations on the amount and type of wild
fish used in feed, and should include a research plan aimed at finding alternatives to wild forage fish as
sources of feedstock for farmed fish. The DEIS attempts to sidestep this issue by making the weak
argument that Gulf and Atlantic menhaden stocks are not considered overfished, even though the
Council can provide no assurance that fishmeal and oil used as feedstock for farmed fish feeds at Gulf of
Mexico aquaculture facilities will come directly from the menhaden reduction fisheries in U.S. waters.
The market for fishmeal and oil is global and much of the meal and oil produced by the menhaden
reduction fishery is shipped abroad to foreign buyers, in part to supply the growing demand for
aquaculture feeds in those countries. There are no provisions in the proposed plan to ensure that supplies
of feedstock for fish feeds are coming from responsibly managed reduction fisheries in the U.S. or
elsewhere. Even with reduced per unit usage in some aquaculture operations, the demand for fishmeal
and fish oil is still growing overall as global aquaculture production expands. Aquaculture developments
in the Gulf of Mexico raising carnivorous fish species in offshore pens will only increase demands on
already heavily exploited forage fish stocks.

Finally, we note that the Fisheries Service is already under-funded to carry out its mission of conserving
and sustaining wild fisheries, and the new authorities and responsibilities envisioned by the proposed
aquaculture FMP would only add to the demands on the agency and the Council. The scale of
aquaculture production envisioned in the DEIS’s preferred alternative would likely require increases in
the NMFS budget or a shifting of agency resources away from the fisheries to the management of fish
farms. Such a course would undermine the agency’s core mission under the MSA to conserve and
sustain fisheries in U.S. waters. It seems to us that the Council should be redoubling its efforts to

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 MFCN Comments on Public Hearing Draft FMP for Regulating Offshore Marine Aquaculture

manage wild fisheries sustainably and focusing all its efforts and resources on the implementation of the
new provisions and requirements of the reauthorized MSA of 2006, not attempting to add a new mission
to develop offshore fish farms in federal waters.

Conclusion

Far too many of our questions and concerns about the environmental and socioeconomic impacts or
sustainability of full-scale commercial offshore aquaculture operations remain unanswered. The DEIS
compounds those concerns by proposing to create an unprecedented aquaculture “FMP” under the
Council’s authority that raises more questions than it answers. The proposed aquaculture FMP
substantially fails to provide an adequate framework addressing all aspects of program administration,
permitting and site selection, compatibility with established fisheries, environmental oversight and
regulation, leasing or royalty fees for the right to use public resources, and viable fish feed substitutes
for wild fish, among others.

In the absence of an effective national legal and regulatory framework for sustainable aquaculture that
addresses these numerous unresolved administrative, environmental, and socioeconomic issues, the
Network believes it is inappropriate for the Council to establish its own rules. Therefore we urge the
Gulf Council not to proceed with this ill-conceived aquaculture “FMP” and to halt its efforts to develop
a plan to permit and regulate offshore aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico until such time as these
concerns have been addressed in national legislation.

Sincerely,

_____________________________
Bruce Stedman, Executive Director