US shipping fairways plan 'would sink ocean fish farming prospects'

A United States Coast Guard (USCG) proposal to create shipping safety fairways along the country’s Atlantic coast would prevent all or most open ocean aquaculture development on the Eastern seaboard, pro-fish farming lobby organisation Stronger America Through Seafood (SATS) has warned.

The Coast Guard proposal is intended to preserve safe and reliable transit of vessels along well-established traffic patterns and routes and to further improve navigation safety.

But SATS says it is an overly broad attempt to foreclose important ocean uses such as open ocean aquaculture.

It argues that the fairways would materially impair or effectively foreclose commercially viable open ocean aquaculture development across much of the Gulf of Maine federal waters region.

A de facto prohibition

“The proposal does not merely reduce siting flexibility; it entirely removes the functional siting options for open ocean aquaculture in federal waters by converting the region’s limited viable footprint into an exclusionary Fairways navigation area,” SATS states in an open letter to Coast Guard commandant Admiral Kevin Lunday.

“In practical terms, the Coast Guard’s Fairways proposal operates as a de facto prohibition on open ocean finfish aquaculture development in the Gulf of Maine, not through explicit regulatory language but through the complete elimination of the physical and engineering conditions required for the deployment of aquaculture farming systems.

“The proposal is not necessary and advances no legitimate governmental interests. Further, it is substantially broader than necessary to achieve the alleged navigational-safety objectives.”

Coast Guard is behind the times

SATS contends that the USCG ignores the substantial technological advancements that already support coexistence on the water without the need for the broad exclusionary zones that the Coast Guard’s Fairways proposal would create.

“The Coast Guard appears to not have adequately evaluated narrower corridors, modified alignments, buffer systems, dynamic routing, seasonal management approaches, or other coexistence mechanisms that could reasonably accommodate both navigation and open ocean aquaculture development in federal waters of the United States.”

SATS points out that there are sophisticated modelling tools that allow for siting of aquaculture farms in areas that minimise user conflicts and avoid highly traversed shipping lanes. It adds that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Aquaculture is in the process of identifying Aquaculture Opportunity Areas (AOAs) in federal waters using such tools.

“It is not necessary to reserve vast ocean areas primarily for speculative future transit flexibility while excluding most other ocean uses such as domestic aquaculture production in the EEZ (excluive economic zone),” writes SATS.

Blue Water Fisheries

The lobby group claims the Coast Guard vastly underestimates the impact of its proposed action on open ocean aquaculture, including on companies such as Blue Water Fisheries, which it says has invested substantial time, resources, and technical effort into project siting and design, and currently has an active permit application before the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), New England District, and the US Environmental Protection Agency, Region One (USEPA).

Blue Water Fisheries wants to install 40 submersible fish pens in two mooring grids that would occupy 250 acres of open water roughly seven miles off the coast of Newburyport, Massachusetts. The company hopes to produce 11,500 tonnes of salmon and steelhead trout annually.

Years of work

“Other farmers have been working for years to navigate an expensive, burdensome, lengthy regulatory process in the Gulf of Maine and in other areas in the Atlantic,” writes SATS.

“In practice, the establishment of Fairways removes large areas of federal waters from consideration for other uses, increases siting uncertainty, and shifts risk and cost on to farmers who must redesign projects, relocate infrastructure, or abandon otherwise viable sites.”

It is urging Lunday to take the “No Action” alternative in regard to the creation of these fairways.

“The US must not foreclose the expansion of aquaculture in federal waters by preventing commercially viable open ocean aquaculture development across much of the Gulf of Maine and down the eastern seaboard,” SATS concludes.