Interpretation: The plan action must be mandated by the resolution and no more – can only include development of ocean resources, space, and energy

Plan requires political capital

The National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Act requires political capital

Stalled regulations hamper domestic growth Market conditions are ripe for an enhanced American aquaculture industry. The U.S. imports 81% of its seafood, creating a $9.4 billion trade deficit, the third largest behind oil and automobiles. In 2007, the U.S. aquaculture industry produced roughly 530,000 metric tons, placing it 14th in the world. Despite a 1980 National Aquaculture Act to encourage the growth of domestic aquaculture, a federal regulatory framework to achieve that goal remains elusive. In late December, California Rep. Lois Capps introduced the National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Act of 2009 to set up a regulatory framework for permitting offshore fish farms in federal waters, which extend from three miles to 200 miles off the coast. States like Maine have a process to permit fish farms in state waters, but as space becomes limited in near-shore areas, the industry is looking to the open ocean for expansion. The bill, H.R. 4363, follows several failed attempts at a national law. The Offshore Aquaculture Act of 2007, for example, never made it out of committee. Michael Rubino, manager of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's aquaculture program, says it's not vehement opposition to the idea of offshore aquaculture that keeps tying up the legislation, just a simple lack of time. "The main thing is Congress has a lot on its plate," Rubino says. "It's tough to get any legislation passed." There's not much hope this current bill will fare any better than its predecessors. Both sides - the environmental lobby and the aquaculture industry - have problems with it, according to advocates for each.

Plan Popular

The plan is popular- scientists and environmentalists will push it

Johns 2013 (Kristen L. [USC School of Law; B.S. Environmental Systems: Ecology, Behavior and Evolution, University of California San Diego]; Farm fishing holes: Gaps in federal regulation offshore aquaculture; 86 S. Cal. L. Rev. 681; kdf)

Her prediction may not prove far off. Interestingly, the same group of environmentalists and fishing interests that had opposed the National Offshore Aquaculture bill voiced support for the National Sustainable OffshoreAquaculture bill. Arguing that the National Offshore Aquaculture Act was defective for not including statutory criteria or legally binding environmental standards, the opponents nonetheless agreed that "some of these issues have been addressed in legislation enacted in California in 2006 (the Sustainable Oceans Act)." n203 Although the National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Act failed to pass in 2009, it was reintroduced in 2011 n204 just a month after NOAA issued the nation's first commercial fishing permit to Kona Blue. After its June 2011 reintroduction, the bill gained support from scientists and environmentalists: the Ocean Conservancy noted that the Act "is an opportunity to protect the U.S. from the risks of poorly regulated open ocean aquaculture." n205

K Links

Cap Link

The aff is rooted in a capitalist epistemology- calling into question the narrative of the “Blue Revolution” and guaranteeing the destruction of ocean

Clark and Clausen 2008 (Brett [teaches sociology at North Carolina State University] and Rebecca [sociology at Fort Lewis College]; The oceanic crisis: capitalism and the degradation of marine ecosystem; monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem; kdf)

The immense problems associated with the overharvest of industrial capture fisheries has led some optimistically to offer aquaculture as an ecological solution. However, capitalist aquaculture fails to reverse the process of ecological degradation. Rather, it continues to sever the social and ecological relations between humans and the ocean. Aquaculture: The Blue Revolution? The massive decline in fish stocks has led capitalist development to turn to a new way of increasing profits—intensified production of fishes. Capitalist aquaculture represents not only a quantitative change in the intensification and concentration of production; it also places organisms’ life cycles under the complete control of private for-profit ownership.31 This new industry, it is claimed, is “the fastest-growing form of agriculture in the world.” It boasts of having ownership from “egg to plate” and substantially alters the ecological and human dimensions of a fishery.32 Aquaculture (sometimes also referred to as aquabusiness) involves subjecting nature to the logic of capital. Capital attempts to overcome natural and social barriers through its constant innovations. In this, enterprises attempt to commodify, invest in, and develop new elements of nature that previously existed outside the political-economic competitive sphere: As Edward Carr wrote in the Economist, the sea “is a resource that must be preserved and harvested….To enhance its uses, the water must become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than hunters.”33 As worldwide commercial fish stocks decline due to overharvest and other anthropogenic causes, aquaculture is witnessing a rapid expansion in the global economy. Aquaculture’s contribution to global supplies of fish increased from 3.9 percent of total worldwide production by weight in 1970 to 27.3 percent in 2000. In 2004, aquaculture and capture fisheries produced 106 million tons of fish and “aquaculture accounted for 43 percent.”34 According to Food and Agriculture Organization statistics, aquaculture is growing more rapidly than all other animal food producing sectors. Hailed as the “Blue Revolution,” aquaculture is frequently compared to agriculture’s Green Revolution as a way to achieve food security and economic growth among the poor and in the third world. The cultivation of farmed salmon as a high-value, carnivorous species destined for market in core nations has emerged as one of the more lucrative (and controversial) endeavors in aquaculture production.35 Much like the Green Revolution, the Blue Revolution may produce temporary increases in yields, but it does not usher in a solution to food security (or environmental problems). Food security is tied to issues of distribution. Given that the Blue Revolution is driven by the pursuit of profit, the desire for monetary gain trumps the distribution of food to those in need.36 Industrial aquaculture intensifies fish production by transforming the natural life histories of wild fish stocks into a combined animal feedlot. Like monoculture agriculture, aquaculture furthers the capitalistic division of nature, only its realm of operation is the marine world. In order to maximize return on investment, aquaculture must raise thousands of fish in a confined net-pen. Fish are separated from the natural environment and the various relations of exchange found in a food web and ecosystem. The fish’s reproductive life cycle is altered so that it can be propagated and raised until the optimum time for mechanical harvest. Aquaculture interrupts the most fundamental metabolic process—the ability of an organism to obtain its required nutrient uptake. Because the most profitable farmed fish are carnivorous, such as Atlantic salmon, they depend on a diet that is high in fishmeal and fish oil. For example, raising Atlantic salmon requires four pounds of fishmeal to produce every one pound of salmon. Consequently, aquaculture production depends heavily on fishmeal imported from South America to feed the farmed carnivorous species.37 The inherent contradiction in extracting fishmeal is that industries must increase their exploitation of marine fish in order to feed the farm-raised fish—thereby increasing the pressure on wild stocks to an even larger extent. Such operations also increase the amount of bycatch. Three of the world’s five largest fisheries are now exclusively harvesting pelagic fish for fishmeal, and these fisheries account for a quarter of the total global catch. Rather than diminishing the demands placed on marine ecosystems, capitalist aquaculture actually increases them, accelerating the fishing down the food chain process. The environmental degradation of populations of marine species, ecosystems, and tropic levels continues.38 Capitalist aquaculture—which is really aquabusiness—represents a parallel example of capital following the patterns of agribusiness. Similar to combined animal feedlots, farmed fish are penned up in high-density cages making them susceptible to disease. Thus, like in the production of beef, pork, and chicken, farmed fish are fed fishmeal that contains antibiotics, increasing concerns about antibiotic exposure in society. In “Silent Spring of the Sea,” Don Staniford explains, “The use of antibiotics in salmon farming has been prevalent right from the beginning, and their use in aquaculture globally has grown to such an extent that resistance is now threatening human health as well as other marine species.” Aquaculturists use a variety of chemicals to kill parasites, such as sea lice, and diseases that spread quickly throughout the pens. The dangers and toxicities of these pesticides in the marine environment are magnified because of the long food chain.39 Once subsumed into the capitalist process, life cycles of animals are increasingly geared to economic cycles of exchange by decreasing the amount of time required for growth. Aquabusiness conforms to these pressures, as researchers are attempting to shorten the growth time required for fish to reach market size. Recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) has been added to some fish feeds to stimulate growth in fishes in aquaculture farms in Hawaii. Experiments with fish transgenics—the transfer of DNA from one species to another—are being done to increase the rate of weight gain, causing altered fish to grow from 60 percent to 600 percent larger than wild stocks.40 These growth mechanisms illustrate capitalist aquaculture’s drive to transform nature to facilitate the generation of profit. In addition, aquaculture alters waste assimilation. The introduction of net-pens leads to a break in the natural assimilation of waste in the marine environment. The pens convert coastal ecosystems, such as bays, inlets, and fjords, into aquaculture ponds, destroying nursery areas that support ocean fisheries. For instance, salmon net-pens allow fish feces and uneaten feed to flow directly into coastal waters, resulting in substantial discharges of nutrients. The excess nutrients are toxic to the marine communities that occupy the ocean floor beneath the net-pens, causing massive die offs of entire benthic populations.41 Other waste products are concentrated around net-pens as well, such as diseases and parasites introduced by the caged salmon to the surrounding marine organisms. The Blue Revolution is not an environmental solution to declining fish stocks. In fact, it is an intensification of the social metabolic order that creates ruptures in marine ecosystems. “The coastal and marine support areas needed for resource inputs and waste assimilation [is]…50,000 times the cultivation area for intensive salmon cage farming.”42 This form of aquaculture places even more demands upon ecosystems, undermining their resiliency. Although aquabusiness is efficient at turning fish into a commodity for markets given the extensive control that is executed over the productive conditions, it is even more energy inefficient than fisheries, demanding more fuel energy investment than the energy produced.43 Confronted by declines in fish stock, capital is attempting to shift production to aquaculture. However, this intense form of production for profit continues to exhaust the oceans and produce a concentration of waste that causes further problems for ecosystems, undermining their ability to regenerate at all levels.

The aff is driven solely through a profit motive

Volpe 2014 (John [Assistant Professor of Invasion and Fisheries Biology at the University of Alberta]; Offshore Aquaculture; www.pbs.org/emptyoceans/fts/offshore/viewpoints.html; kdf)

The economies of scale that are being talked about in the offshore industry is about generating profit, not about generating food. This is the leading edge of a privatization that has a much broader horizon. With just aquaculture, we're looking at tapping the common resources in the ocean itself. The future plans are very worrying. The individual states along the West Coast particularly have run across very strident oppositions with the coastal aquaculture model. So the motivation now on the part of the federal government is to remove the jurisdiction from the states, off shore and in the economic exclusion zone. We're moving coastal or state input in the decisions. We're taking a very flawed model that is essentially a net loss of protein production and then amplifying that model hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. This is really a money grab and is the leading edge of the privatization of the offshore environment, the last common, truly common environment left on this earth – the privatization of the ocean. Aquaculture is the way of the future and there's definitely room for aquaculture on this coast. What there is not room for is this simple Wild West, money grubbing, economic bottom-line-only model. We need to produce food, not profit.

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