Nobody happy about farmed fish organic standards

Odd Grydeland

In its wisdom, the Livestock Committee of the US based National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) has approved recommendations to be made to the National Organic program of the United States Department of Agriculture that will eliminate any possibility of many farmed fish species to be certified as organic, simply because of the location where they are produced. The requirement for net pen operators to only use fish of "local genotypes", prohibiting non-native species from being certified as "organic" is ludicrous, to say the least.

Take the production of farmed Atlantic salmon in British Columbia, for example; here you have a species of fish that would not qualify as "organic" just because it's not native to the region. But why, when you consider the following facts:

• It consumes less food than the native salmon species in order to produce a set amount of protein
• If it escapes from the pens, it can not cross breed with native salmon, and therefore have no negative effect on the wild salmon gene pool
• Escaped Atlantic salmon in BC (and Washington State) and millions of intentionally released fish of this species have shown a miserable ability to survive in the wild, with no known self-sustaining populations established anywhere in the Pacific Ocean
• Atlantic salmon farmed in BC is one of the healthies livestock species produced, with low use of medicines, if used at all.

This criteria would also eliminate Tilapia from being certified anywhere outside its native range in Egypt. 

Another criteria apparently approved by the NOSB is for "organic" fish not to be subjected to improvement through selective breeding- a criteria not applied to many other livestock species like chicken and turkey.

ENGO's are up in arms about the fact that the NOSB even considered allowing net-pen reared salmon to be certified as "organic"- particularly due to the fact that farmed salmon is fed fishmeal and -oil from limited resources. What they don't ackonowledge is the fact that if fishmeal was not used to feed farmed salmon, it would be used to feed chicken and pigs- animals that would need a lot more of this protein source than salmon in order to produce a set amount of food for humans.