Earliest Bird ’14Aquaculture Aff
Aquaculture Affirmative
FYI
Resolution
Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its non-military exploration and/or development of the Earth’s oceans.
Strategy guide
This aff is pretty straightforward- don’t let the long-ish plan text fool you. It has Congress set up a system of financial incentives and permits (green lights) for offshore fish farming and specifies that the NOAA (a federal agency) has control over the process. I’ve included a list of terms to know that explains some of the more technical details of things like IMTA and the EEZ.
The most likely form of financial incentives that the plan gives would be trading credits mentioned in the Troell and Chopin 1AC cards, which reward producers for sustainable practices that cut down on waste.
If you need to cut down on time in the 1AC, feel free to re-highlight or cut out some impacts.
Have fun debating!
Terms to know
What is aquaculture?
The FAO has defined aquaculture as “the farming of aquatic organisms, including fish, mollusks, crustaceans and aquatic plants. Farming implies some form of intervention in the rearing process to enhance production as well as ownership of the stock being cultivated” (FAO 2000).
The difference between aquaculture and fisheries is that aquaculture involves harvesting all marine life (shrimp, oysters, etc.), while fisheries mainly involve fish.
What is integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA)?
Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA) is a practice in which the by-products (wastes) from one species are recycled to become inputs (fertilizers, food and energy) for another…The major benefit of IMTA is the ability to reduce wastage while producing new cash-crops, ultimately resulting in improved operational sustainability…When IMTA is implemented correctly, fed aquaculture species (e.g. finfish/shrimps) are grown alongside selected organic extractive species (e.g. suspension feeders/deposit feeders/herbivorous fish) and inorganic extractive species (e.g. seaweeds). For example, the wastes emitted from the cage culture of salmon would be assimilated by shellfish and seaweed, which are also of commercial value.
Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)
The U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extends no more than 200 nautical miles from the territorial sea baseline and is adjacent to the 12 nautical mile territorial sea of the U.S., including the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and any other territory or possession over which the United States exercises sovereignty. Within the EEZ, the U.S. has: Sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring, exploiting, conserving and managing natural resources, whether living and nonliving, of the seabed and subsoil and the superjacent waters and with regard to other activities for the economic exploitation and exploration of the zone, such as the production of energy from the water, currents and winds; Jurisdiction as provided for in international and domestic laws with regard to the establishment and use of artificial islands, installations, and structures, marine scientific research, and the protection and preservation of the marine environment; and Other rights and duties provided for under international and domestic laws.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a US federal agency that deals with (you guessed it) issues surrounding the oceans and atmosphere.
Aquaponics deal with growing fish and plants in unison.
1AC
1AC
Observation 1 is Inherency:
Global aquaculture is at a crossroads- new positive trends are key to solidify the industry
Thorsen 4-14-14 [ØisteinThorsen, Principal Consultant, Benchmark Sustainability Science, MSc in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics (LSE), spent several years at the United Nations representing Oxfam International, joined Oxfam in Oxford in 2006 working on global agricultural trade, “Investing in Aquaculture’s Future,”
Aquaculture is at a crossroads. According to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the last three decades have seen global food fish aquaculture production expand “by almost 12 times, at an average annual rate of 8.8 per cent.” As a relatively new industry facing the pressure of driving higher rates of production per unit area, it has the opportunity to learn from others’ mistakes and embrace the development of a new set of sustainable management practices. Continued industry success and global expansion, ØisteinThorsen from Benchmark Sustainability Science argues, will come from identifying investment and early development opportunities focused on addressing aquaculture’s challenges around disease, feed and waste management. Disease: Like all forms of farming, aquaculture is a sector full of risks. The artificial ecosystems that aquaculture creates pose many challenges that can be addressed through equipment, technology and best stewardship practices that aim to accommodate the natural behaviors and environment of the farmed species. Facilitating welfare-focused fish production models can mitigate disease pressures and as a result produce better fish growth, more efficient food conversion, increased resistance to disease, and overall increases in survival. In this regard fish welfare is not simply an altruistic agenda, but rather the backbone of a healthy business. As a result opportunities will grow for developing health solutions that move away from reliance on antibiotics and other disease treatments to those focused on prevention – including vaccines and probiotics.¶ Feed: For the majority of finfish aquaculture operations, feed is generally the most costly input, and a rising one at that. In response to these increasing costs and environmental impacts associated with overfeeding, technologies monitoring food waste and effectively regulating food delivery have been developed and continue to evolve. This is just one example of how technological innovations coupled with good stewardship practices are driving industry profitability and sustainability. With regards to the larger issue of feed raw ingredient sourcing, such a quick fix has not been identified, though there are signs of progress. In 2004 one third of the world’s fish catch was used to produce fishmeal and fish oil primarily for the aquaculture industry according to WWF. The good news is that the industry’s reliance on fishmeal and fish oil is decreasing due to increased use of plant-based feed from major agricultural crops like soybean and corn. However, with rising and volatile commodity prices fueled by pressures on agricultural land use and a changing climate, reliance on such crops can prove risky and expensive for fish farmers. This provides biotech development and investment opportunities for using bacteria, yeast, algae, insects and animal by-products as feed ingredients. Early results include positive health benefits for farmed fish fed on yeast and bacteria grown on natural gas. By-and-large these initiatives are in their early stages and not yet ready for large scale industrial application, however, they should be encouraged as they could hold the key to effective protein production in a resource constrained world.¶ Waste: Similarly to traditional farming practices of all scales, fish farms produce waste and impact the environment in which they are situated. There is the risk that these wastes can become significant pollutants and a cause of conflict between fish farmers and their coastal neighbors. No one system in existence outperforms all others in all waste emission or energy use categories, showing the need for continued innovation in this field. Exploration in the design of systems that use waste as nutrition, fuel for secondary crops, or products like feed, fertilizer or energy continues to thrive. All of these opportunities are at an early stage and have not been proven at an industrial level yet, but they could have the potential to boost on-farm profits by reducing feed and electricity bills, and provide additional income streams by turning waste into sought after products like biogas, fertilizer, carbon credits, or secondary crops like seaweed.
Thus the plan:
The United States Congress should substantially increase development of offshore integrated multi-trophic aquaculture in the United States’ Exclusive Economic Zone through financial incentives and permits regulated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.
Advantage 1 is Food Security:
Food crises are coming- offshore aquacultureexpansion is key to food stability
Tiller et al ’13 [Rachel Tiller, PhD, Post Doctoral Fellow with a focus on marine research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Fulbright Scholar, Russell Richards, PhD with research expertise in coastal and ocean management, Griffith University, Rebecca Gentry, former Policy Analyst at the Ministry of Fisheries, New Zealand, PhD student at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, “Stakeholder driven future scenarios as an element of interdisciplinary management tools; the case of future offshore aquaculture development and the potential effects on fishermen in Santa Barbara, California,” Ocean & Coastal Management¶ Volume 73, March 2013, Pages 127–135, ScienceDirect, online]
In light of this, the following paper discusses these challenges looking at the case of future offshore aquaculture development in the US. The perceived effects of this industry are explored from the vantage point of the stakeholders affected. This is important given that some research suggests that 24–36% of wild fish stocks have collapsed worldwide and that 68–72% of global fish stocks are overexploited or collapsed (Worm et al., 2006; Pauly, 2007, 2008; FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, 2010). This global concern has provided researchers and resource managers with a common understanding that capture fisheries have a strong impact on the ecosystem in which they operate. If ‘business as usual’ is continued, serious threats to global food security could be imminent given the downward trend of the capture fishing industry's access to wild fish coupled with an increased global reliance on seafood for protein, largely driven by big emerging economies like India and China (AntunesZappes et al.). Global fisheries policies have for decades mitigated commercial fishing efforts in an attempt to reduce the rate of fishing pressure on wild stocks. Several solutions have been suggested to stop this downward trend of fish supply, including no-take Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and moving from single species fisheries management to that of EBFM (Ray, 2011). There has been, however, increased attention on more direct adaptation possibilities for ameliorating the juxtaposition between the increased demand for seafood and declining wild supply, and the necessity to find more efficient means of food production to feed a growing population. The primary method has been by aquaculture expansion during the last few decades in the US and beyond (Abdallah and Sumaila, 2007; Olin et al., 2012). Aquaculture already accounted for 46 percent of total global food fish supply in 2008 and is the fastest-growing animal-food-producing sector globally, even outpacing human population growth (FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, 2010). The per capita supply of animal protein from aquaculture has also increased, from 0.7 kg in 1970 to 7.8 kg in 2008, reflecting an average annual growth rate of 6.6 percent although this growth rate is beginning to slow. This adaptation process, thus, has now taken a step further by moving out beyond the sheltered coves, fjords, ponds and lakes where aquaculture has historically occurred. Currently, industry is looking further offshore for future development, which is reflected in the explicit consideration of policy makers to opening up US federal waters to offshore aquaculture in recent years (Varmer et al., 2005; Welp et al., 2006; Abreu et al., 2011; Impson, 2011; Oosterveer and Spaargaren, 2011; Boyd, 2012). This mitigation path by policy makers could be considered a de facto realization that the attempts to mitigate capture fishing efforts to reduce pressure on wild stocks is failing (Kalikoski et al., 2010).¶Given this, the need to rethink the opportunities for increased global seafood production while still accounting for fisheries management has been realized. The possible interplay that will take place between stakeholder interests when an offshore aquaculture industry goes commercial, however, is imminent and requires addressing. The paper thus first introduces the development of US offshore aquaculture. This is followed by a description of the current state of scenario building in the literature, in both the natural and the social sciences and the differences between these. For the latter, the case of offshore aquaculture development where both Systems Thinking and Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) are used together in a workshop setting is proposed as a method for eliciting stakeholder driven scenarios that are quantitative in output. This method was tested on a core group of stakeholders identified as being likely impacted if offshore aquaculture were to be developed in Santa Barbara, namely commercial fishermen. This research sought to document how fishermen perceive offshore aquaculture will affect them. While stakeholder perceptions of impact are not necessarily accurate in terms of likely actual impacts, it is perception that often gives rise to conflict, and therefore understanding and addressing these perceptions is essential for any successful policy process (Adams et al., 2003). The paper then proposes moving from an eco-systemic to a socio-ecological system of managing the marine environment by including expert data elicited from the stakeholder workshops into existing biological prediction models, or by specifically creating new models. The scenarios extracted from the stakeholder participatory workshop and the follow up interviews describe the possible impact of a future offshore aquaculture development off the coast of California from the vantage point of a potentially affected stakeholder group. We suggest that in a more comprehensive interdisciplinary model, an early warning system for managers can be developed as a policy recommendation tool, delimiting the variable paths toward each stakeholder driven scenario. We also suggest that this type of stakeholder driven information would be critical for policy makers to understand where potential future conflicts are likely to occur, in order that identified or perceived conflicts can be investigated, addressed, and resolved or mitigated in the planning stages for offshore aquaculture.¶2. US offshore aquaculture developments¶The United States is a major consumer of seafood, including aquaculture products. In 2010, however, 86% of seafood consumed in the US was imported with half of this produced through aquaculture. This import of 5.5 billion pounds per year was valued at $14.8 billion in 2009 (Abdallah and Sumaila, 2007). The necessity for import stems from the US aquaculture production, both fresh and marine, accounting for only 5% of US seafood supply, with marine-based aquaculture supplying less than 1.5%. Furthermore, US aquaculture production is ranked 13th globally after countries such as China, Canada, Norway and Chile. Indeed, the US imports about 300 million pounds of farmed salmon every year, primarily from Canada, Norway, and Chile. This dependency on imported seafood leads to an annual seafood trade deficit of over $9 billion (AntunesZappes et al.; U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, 2004; Santa Barbara Mariculture, 2011).¶Until recently, there has been no universal method of obtaining permits for aquaculture in US federal waters beyond the 3-mile state waters to the limits of the US Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Access to sites in coastal areas under state jurisdiction face challenges of their own with competing claims to coastal usage as well as a plethora of local, state and federal permits under the existing US laws and regulations ( Welp et al., 2006). The US EEZ is large however, and setting aside 500 km2, which accounts for 0.01% of the entire area under federal marine jurisdiction, would allow for an additional 600,000 metric tons of additional seafood to be produced annually ( Carr and Heyman, 2012). The lack of a regulatory framework in US federal waters has thus effectively prohibited aquaculture ventures and the expansion of the industry for domestic seafood needs to be met with national products ( Edelman, 2012). In 2004, however, it was recommended by the US Commission on Ocean Policy that there be established a regulatory framework for aquaculture licensing in federal waters. A National Offshore Aquaculture Act would clarify federal regulatory requirements, allowing businesses and individuals to obtain a permit to operate in federal waters ( Welp et al., 2006). In lieu of this, however, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the primary federal agency, under the Department of Commerce, charged with overseeing and permitting aquaculture production in the US ( Santa Barbara Mariculture, 2011) has taken charge. In working toward lessening the trade deficit in seafood commerce, the Department of Commerce and NOAA released national sustainable marine aquaculture policies during the summer of 2011. One of the implementations toward this goal is the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Plan for Aquaculture, which includes the required regulatory framework for offshore aquaculture production in the Gulf ( Abreu et al., 2011). Starting up offshore aquaculture could potentially not only increase domestic seafood production dramatically, but also provide job opportunities among others to U.S. fishermen, in for instance jobs that involve vessel maintenance and maintenance of offshore operations ( FAO, 2005–2012).
US is key to food stability- shifting away from currentsources is key to prevent destabilizing food crises
Coleman ’12 [Isobel Coleman, Senior Fellow and Director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative; Director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program, “U.S. Drought and Rising Global Food Prices,” August 2,
Theongoing drought in the Midwesthas affected approximately80 percent of the U.S. corn cropand more than 11 percent ofthesoybean crop, triggering a rise in global food prices (RFE/RL)thatCFR's Isobel Coleman saysmay fuel political instabilityin developing countries. The United States produces approximately 35 percent of the world's corn and soybean supply, commodities that are "crucial in the food chain, because they are used for feed stock for animals," Coleman says.Growing demand for meat and protein from emergent middle classes internationallyhas made many countries dependent on "relatively inexpensivefood stocks" from the UnitedStates, she explains. "When you see a crop failureof the magnitude you have seen this summer,it flows through the whole food chain," says Coleman, who recommends reconsidering the U.S. ethanol mandate and building "more resilience into the global food system." How is the U.S. drought affecting commodity crops, food production, and prices? As recently as May, experts were predicting a record crop in the United States--and of course, what the United States does is so important, because the Midwest is the bread basket for the rest of the world.