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After a year of divisive public hearings and hundreds of pages of revisions, federal fisheries regulators this week will decide whether to open the Gulf of Mexico to industrial-scale fish farms that could yield more than 60 million pounds of additional seafood from the ocean.
The proposal has been assailed by an unlikely alliance of environmental and fishing interests, who say large concentrations of fish in submersible cages could pose ecological threats to wild populations. Fisheries regulators drafting the offshore aquaculture plan have worked over the past year to address many of those concerns, including requirements for an aquatic animal health inspector and permits from numerous federal agencies.
"Any project that's put in the Gulf of Mexico will be required to have more permits and more regulatory oversight than any other activity in the Gulf, including the petroleum industry," said Joseph Hendrix, a marine aquaculture consultant and Texas representative to the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, which is expected to vote on the plan Thursday during its meeting in Mobile, Ala. "The idea that we're just going to put these out there and there will be all these environmental impacts and damage is not a correct assumption."
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