Panama

I arrived last night at Puerto Lindo, a small town on Panama's Atlantic coast that doesn't show up on Google Maps. Housed in a former two-story hotel (pictured) right on the beach is the headquarters of Open Blue Sea Farms, an aquaculture company founded by Brian O'Hanlon. Open Blue Sea Farms is on the forefront of offshore fish farming, a new segment of the aquaculture industry. O'Hanlon and his 30 employees are farming cobia, a white fish similar to haddock. The company is testing different equipment specifically designed for the rough conditions of the open oceans, including AquaPods from Searsmont, Maine-based Ocean Farms Technology.

In the photo: several stacks of triangular panels for a yet-to-be-built AquaPod sit in the yard in front of Open Blue Sea Farms' beachside HQ.

Open Blue Sea Farms is "over the horizon"

Open Blue Sea Farms is "further offshore than any other farm in the world," Brian O'Hanlon, founder and president of the aquaculture company said in a Q&A with SeafoodSource.com.

The company is on the forefront of the aquaculture industry's move offshore. It gained experience raising cobia in the waters off Puerto Rico, but upped its game in August when it purchased Panama's Pristine Oceans, creating the largest open ocean aquaculture operation in the world. Open Blue Sea Farms is now farming cobia on the north coast of Panama, in Colon province. I will be traveling there at the end of this month as part of my fellowship from International Center for Journalists.

O'Hanlon says in the interview that the company has 50,000 fish in the water right now, but expects to add 200,000-plus over the next 12 months.

And despite the move in the United States to allow offshore fish farming in the Gulf of Mexico, O'Hanlon says it will be a while before any venture there will be profitable and that his attention is wholly focused on Panama for the time being.

Go to the Q&A from SeafoodSource.com >>

Editor: Don't believe anything you just read...

I read an interesting article this morning in the Daily Observer, a newspaper in Monrovia, Liberia. The article, called 'Let's prioritize aquaculture,' caught my eye not because it said anything new about fish farming, but because the editor decided to end the article with a bang.

The article detailed a tour of Liberia's aquaculture operations by the country's director of the Bureau of National Fisheries, a Mr. Subah. This Mr. Subah spent the tour touting the benefits of aquaculture as a lucrative business that could feed and employ Liberians. He called it a viable economic venture and said the government would encourage farmers to become involved.

The unnamed reporter maintained an unbiased voice in the story. But the article ended with this rather doomsday-style note (emphasis mine):

Editor’s note: It should be made clear that aquaculture, which is widely practiced in the United States and other developed nations, has serious implications. The environmental impacts of fish farming can be devastating, destroying whole aquatic ecosystems. Some species of fish are invasive. It means that once introduced into a water body, they kill off all other fish species and take over, eliminating the natural variety that once existed and a food web that took millennia to evolve.

Liberia, being on the west coast of the continent of Africa, has a richness of sea food that should be guarded jealously. In this regard, fixing the broken system at the Free port of Monrovia, repairing the country's roads for better sea-to-market transport and creating a system that equips Liberian fishermen with the knowledge and tools to practice their trade responsibly and lucratively may prove to be more sustainable than rushing into an artificial system whose impact could be devastating and whose effects have already become evident elsewhere.

I bet Mr. Subah loved that epilogue to his aquaculture-love tour.

So much for reliable reporting. Some forms of aquaculture certainly have well-documented adverse impacts to the local environment, but accusing aquaculture of "destroying whole aquatic ecosystems" and "eliminating ... a food web that took millenia to evolve"? I would say those are not fair statements about aquaculture.

Also, the reporter claimed a fish farm on the bank of Liberia's St. Paul River had 5,000 species of fish, "including the African cat fish." Considering the fact there are only about 400 species of fish farmed around the world, I assume the reporter meant to say that there are 5,000 fish at this farm.

Go to the article from the Daily Observer >>