Aquaculture Affirmative SLUDL / NAUDL 2014-15
Aquaculture Affirmative SLUDL / NAUDL 2014-15
Aquaculture Affirmative
Special thanks to Jason Peterson and the Michigan National Debate Institute and Dan Bagwell and the Wake Forest Early Bird Institute who did the initial research for these arguments and made them available to the NAUDL Core File project.
Summary
Glossary
1AC -14
Inherency
Answers to: Aquaculture Strong22-23
Answers to: Reform now
Overfishing
Answers to: Aquaculture causes overfishing-19
Answers to: Aquaculture Harms the Environment
Answers to: No Fishery Collapse
Answers to: Aquaculture doesn’t feed more-4
Answers to: Other causes kill fish-6
Economy
Aquaculture helps coastal economies
Seafood Trade Deficit- Extensions
Answers to: Aquaculture Destroys Fishing Industry-32
Solvency
Answers to: Number of Barriers to Aquaculture-4
Answers to: Agency Consolidation Fails
Answers to: Global Model Fails
Solvency- Plan creates sustainable aquaculture- Extension-9
Counterplan Answers
Answers to Urban Aquaculture Counterplan-41
Summary
The Aquaculture Affirmative looks to tackle the problem of overfishing and offer a unique solution to the issue by encouraging the development of open ocean aquaculture in waters controlled by the United States. Currently aquaculture is not growing in the United States because of conflicting state and federal regulations. .Investors don’t even know if they can own the fish they grow in the ocean, so it is not a great environment for growth. But why do we need aquaculture?
Overfishing
Wild fish populations are under increased stress around the world. The earth’s population keeps growing and people need high quality and affordable protein. Fish provide a healthy and affordable option for millions of people around the world. As more people reach the middle class they start looking for fresh fish and other quality products even if they are not native to their area. The demand for fish will continue to grow. The collapse of many fisheries from overfishing has lead to the growth of aquaculture around the world. Aquaculture , or fish farming, is just the process of growing something in water. Many land based aquaculture facilities are environmentally harmful and require lots of energy to run. But nearly 90% of the fish consumed in America comes from foreign aquaculture sources. Without building sustainable methods for growing more fish we will harm the environment and could collapse the entire ocean food chain.
Economy
Thousands of fishing communities in coastal regions of America have grown up around healthy fisheries from Boston to San Francisco entire industries have sprung from harvesting fish from the oceans. Years of overfishing has collapsed the viability of many of these ocean waters to support communities on land. Creating open ocean aquaculture will create thousands of new jobs- manufacturing fish cages, maintaining ocean farms, processing fish. Millions of dollars will flood back into dying coastal communities helping revitalize them
What does the plan do?
authorizes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as the lead federal regulator
This sets up a single federal agency for those who want to build aquaculture to work with. It eliminates red tape and hassle that has prevented many startups from being formed.
requires the NOAA to issue legally binding national standards and regulations to prevent or minimize impacts on the marine ecosystem and fisheries
This requirement promotes sustainable practices in aquaculture. You want to avoid a race where companies just try to get out a cheap product by skimping on things like environmental protections.
establishes a research program to guide the precautionary development of offshore aquaculture in the EEZ
Research will help the industry grow and learn from mistakes.
Glossary
apocalyptic -describing or prophesying the complete destruction of the world.
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).
Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)- area of the ocean where the United States has the right to economically develop
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.
Fisheries - area where fish are caught in the wild as opposed to those raised in aquaculture
Fish stocks- number of fish living in a fishery or geographic area
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a US federal agency that deals with (you guessed it) issues surrounding the oceans and atmosphere.
Sustainable- able to be maintained at a certain rate or level. Usually used to refer to practices that take into account their environmental impact
1
Aquaculture AffirmativeSLUDL / NAUDL 2014-15
1AC
Aquaculture 1AC (Short Version) 1 of5
Contention 1 The current condition of aquaculture is a patchwork of regulations at the national and state level, which makes it hard to start a fish farm, fails to protect the environment, and does not encourage investment.
Johns, J.D. Candidate, USC Law, 2013
(March 2013, Kristen L., Southern California Law Review, FARM FISHING HOLES: GAPS IN FEDERAL REGULATION OF OFFSHORE AQUACULTURE,” 86 S. Cal. L. Rev. 681,)
III. DEFICIENCIES OF THE CURRENT REGULATORY SCHEME
The current regime for regulating offshore aquaculture needs to be revised. There is no lead federal agency for regulating offshore aquaculture and no comprehensive law directly addressing how it should be [*699] administered, regulated, and monitored. Multiple federal agencies are then left to assert their authority to regulate different aspects of offshore aquaculture under a variety of existing laws that werenot designed for this purpose.n92 This system can lead to bothoverregulation of some aspects of the industry, such as overlapping permitting requirements, as well as underregulation of other aspects, such as the effects of escaped farmed fish on natural ecosystems.Furthermore, because none of the existing laws were designed to deal specifically with aquaculture, many are left vulnerable to challenge as proper legal bases for regulatory authority.
A. Administrative Overlap Creates Patchy Regulation
A number of federal agencies have invoked authority to regulate aquaculture activities in federal waters under various statutory authorities: EPA under the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Protection Act, the Ocean Dumping Act, and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; NOAA under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the National Marine Sanctuaries Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act and the Endangered Species Act; Army Corps of Engineers under the Rivers and Harbors Act and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act; U.S. Coast Guard under the Rivers and Harbors Act; the Fish and Wildlife Service under the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Lacey Act; Food and Drug Administration under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act; and Department of Agriculture under the National Aquaculture Act.Under this patchy regulatory scheme, each agency imposes its own independent requirements with little interagency cooperation or collaboration - resulting in both overlapping regulatory requirements as well as gaps in the regulation of certainserious environmental risks.
The most significant consequence of allowing multiple agencies to invoke regulatory authority over different aspects of offshore aquaculture is thatthere is currently no centralized or streamlined process for obtaining a permit to operate a farm in federal waters. n93 As discussed in Part II.C, the permitting process is often cited as the single greatest constraint to offshore [*700] aquaculture development. Because there is no specific permitting system for offshore aquaculture, multiple agencies have invoked their authority to require permits for various aspects of the aquaculture activities. This complex multiagency permitting system is confusing, time-consuming, and costly.
Aquaculture 1AC (Short Version) 2 of5
Contention 2: Current policies fail to protect fish… Global fish stocks are in peril
Tiller et al, Post Doctoral Fellow and Fulbright Scholar at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2013
(Rachel, “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)
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 suggeststhat 24–36% of wild fish stocks have collapsed worldwide andthat 68–72% of global fish stocks are overexploited or collapsed(Worm et al., 2006; Pauly, 2007, 2008; FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, 2010).Thisglobal concern has provided researchers and resource managers with a common understanding that capture fisheries have a strong impact on the ecosystemin 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 (Antunes Zappes et al.). Global fisheries policies have for decadesmitigated 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 expansionduring the last few decades in the US and beyond (Abdallah and Sumaila, 2007; Olin et al., 2012).Aquaculturealready 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).¶
Aquaculture 1AC (Short Version) 3 of 5
Therefore, we propose that the United States federal government should create a National Offshore Aquaculture Framework that
authorizes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as the lead federal agency for regulating offshore aquaculture and gives it authority to determine appropriate locations for, permit, regulate, monitor, and enforce offshore aquaculture in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)
requires the NOAA to issue legally binding national standards and regulations to prevent or minimize impacts on the marine ecosystem and fisheries
establishes a research program to guide the precautionary development of offshore aquaculture in the EEZ
Aquaculture 1AC (Short Version) 4 of5
Contention 3: Our plan can solve the crisis
A. The plan, based on the National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Act, is the best way to develop environmentally sustainable offshore aquaculture. It is a product of systemic research from relevant stakeholders.
Johns, J.D. Candidate, USC Law, 2013
(March 2013, Kristen L., Southern California Law Review, FARM FISHING HOLES: GAPS IN FEDERAL REGULATION OF OFFSHORE AQUACULTURE,” 86 S. Cal. L. Rev. 681,)
Because of the concerns expressed above, existing statutes are not adequate bases of authority for implementing a federal regulatory [*715] framework for offshore aquaculture. Instead, Congress should enact new legislation that explicitly creates a national regulatory framework. Below, I will discuss what a proper framework should include and describe previous attempts to implement a marine aquaculture policy. I will conclude by endorsingthe National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Act of 2011 as the ideal piece of legislation to create such a framework.
In 2003, the Pew Oceans Commission, a bipartisan, independent group of American leaders in science, fishing, conservation, government, education and business, recommended that Congress implement a "new national marine aquaculture policy based on sound conservation principles and standards." n180 Five years later,theU.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources commissioned theGovernment Accountability Office ("GAO") to research and report to it how to go about developing such a framework.After meeting with a wide variety of important aquaculture stakeholders and analyzing laws, regulations, and studies, the GAO identified the key issues that should be addressed in the development of effective regulation.
First, the GAO noted thatidentifying a lead federal agency, as well as clarifying the roles and responsibilities of other relevant federal agencies, was central to the administration of an offshore aquaculture program. n181 Specifically,most stakeholders identified NOAA as the appropriate lead federal agency because of its expertise in fisheries and oceans management.n182 Indeed, most scholars and scientists agree that NOAA is best suited for assuming the role of lead federal agency due to its long history of managing ocean resources and its unique positioning through the Regional Fishery Councils to address the user-conflict problems associated with any resource proposal. As one article put it, "There are obvious impacts on wild capture fisheries and on marine mammals which no other federal agency could more effectively evaluate."n183
The GAO alsorecommended thata streamlined permitting system be created to give offshore aquaculturists the legal right to occupy a given area and toestablish terms and conditions for offshore aquaculture [*716] operations. n184 Stakeholders again agreed that NOAA should be the primary agency to manage a permitting or leasing program for offshore aquaculture facilities. n185 Another important aspect of a regulatory framework was some kind of process to ensure proper management of environmental impacts, either by mandating facility-by-facility environmental review and monitoring, and / or enforcing policies mitigating the potential impacts of escaped fish and remediating environmental damage. n186 Finally, a regulatory framework must include a federal research component to help fill current gaps in knowledge about offshore aquaculture. n187
Aquaculture 1AC (Short Version) 5 of5
B. The technology exists for sustainable aquaculture that does not harm the environment. The US needs to create regulations to encourage their use and be a model for the world.
Smith, J.D. Harvard Law School, 2012
(Turner, 4/19/2012, Turner, “Greening the Blue Revolution: How History Can Inform a Sustainable Aquaculture Movement,” 1/11938741/Smith_2012.pdf?sequence=1)
Luckily,the rapid development of technology accompanying the “blue revolution”348 has ensured thatsustainable aquaculture production is available and feasible. For example, in addition to the possibility of moving offshore to dilute coastal pollution, researchers have developed closed systems that require minimal disease and pest control and produce virtually no pollution.349 Aquaculturalists arealso perfecting integrated systems, also called polyculture systems that combine culture of fish aquaculture with culture of mollusks or seaweedso “the wastes from one organism are used as inputs to another, resulting in the optimal use of resources and less pollutionoverall.”350 These systems have the potential to beboth more environmentally soundoperations and more economically efficient.351 Moreover, the use of fishmeal in aquaculture feed can be reduced and researchers are using developing more sustainable plant-based feeds for use on fish farms.352 Thus, the technology exists to guide aquaculture onto a sustainable path.
Aquaculture’srecent boom and the rapid technological development have madeit the obvious choice going forwardfor satisfying the world’s growing appetite for protein.353 It is a choice that has potential to be more sustainable, as an alternative to exploitative overfishing and as a lower-impact source of protein than many industrially raised terrestrial livestock, if done correctly. 354 But we have a long way to go. As stated by James Connaughton, former Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality,
Now is the time, not to have a national conversation about aquaculture, now is the time to have a national system of sound management of aquaculture to provide the certainty that’s necessary to do it right, to assure that we have the ecological integrity to the process[sic], and, again, to set a beacon for the world.355