By Chelsea Brown (WAVES) and Mia Glover (WAVES and the Inland Ocean Coalition)

Just as farming, ranching, and stewardship of land and rivers are part of Colorado’s cultural heritage, many coastal communities in the U.S. are deeply rooted in fishing traditions and caretaking relationships with the sea. The seafood we buy is one way we can support fishing communities and our shared oceans. We can also ask our legislators to support the recently-introduced Domestic Seafood Production Act.

Coloradans care where our food comes from. Many of us choose to support community-based businesses, growers, and food providers, boosting local economies and avoiding the negative 3impacts of the global food system, such as high carbon emissions and corporate consolidation. Likewise, Colorado’s politicians have helped protect the rights of our local farmers and ranchers, as vital producers that contribute to Colorado’s economy and feed our state. 

Why should seafood be any different? Considering the health benefits of consuming seafood, and the fact that incorporating lean protein and omega threes is crucial for a well balanced diet, Coloradans are eating more seafood every year. Even though our state is landlocked, we can take measures to support family-scale and community-based operations in the U.S. that harvest seafood with values. 

An important opportunity for doing so is the Domestic Seafood Production Act (DSPA), legislation recently introduced by Representatives Mary Peltola of Alaska and Troy Carter of New Orleans, LA to support our country’s working waterfronts and small-scale fishing communities. As co-founders of WAVES, an environmental organization dedicated to promoting food sovereignty, we laud Representatives Peltola and Carter, and urge our Colorado congressional representatives to support this Act. 

Currently, most of the seafood we eat in the U.S. is imported. Some of that seafood is originally landed here, exported to be processed by low-wage laborers, and then re-imported. Nevertheless, somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of all seafood consumed in the U.S. originates from overseas. 

Contrast that with a recent study in Nature Ocean Sustainability, which found that seafood self-reliance in the U.S. is actually within reach. One of the researchers’ conclusions was that achieving greater seafood independence in the U.S. requires investments in infrastructure. 

DSPA does just that by funding processing infrastructure for U.S. wild-capture fisheries and mariculture, defined as cultivation of shellfish and aquatic plants. Processing — cleaning, fileting, and otherwise preparing seafood for consumption — is often a bottleneck that prevents seafood supply chains from staying localized and transparent. By expanding processing capacity, DSPA allows U.S. seafood producers to provide more nutritious, high-quality, and affordable seafood to domestic consumers.

The Act also protects our oceans by placing checks on the development of industrial finfish farming in U.S. federal waters. The ocean-based equivalent of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), factory fish farms come with a host of impacts, including disease outbreaks, mass escapes, and pollutant discharge into the open ocean. Because many farmed finfish are carnivorous, these operations can also exacerbate overfishing by extracting more wild fish to make fish feed than they actually produce in the form of farmed protein.

Intensive aquaculture also slots into the global industrial food system. Many of the same corporate giants responsible for consolidating land-based agriculture and food distribution — like Cargill, JBS Foods, and Sysco — are now pushing for the export of factory farming from land to sea. 

Representing WAVES and the Inland Ocean Coalition, we recently advocated in Washington D.C. against industrial offshore finfish farms with the coalition Don’t Cage Our Oceans. The coalition, comprising family fishers and farmers, chefs, and environmental advocates, promotes values-based seafood systems over profit-hungry industrial aquaculture. 

We were grateful to meet with Senator Michael Bennet, Congressman Joe Neguse, and their teams, who heard us out on the harms of factory fish farming and the need to support fishing communities that have long contributed to the economies and cultural fabric of our country. We urge Senators Hickenlooper and Bennet, and Representative Neguse, to see the parallels between our mountain streams and the vast oceans, and to recognize how an unsustainable, greed-driven food system can ripple back to affect Colorado’s farms, rangelands, and water systems. We also encourage our fellow Colorado seafood lovers to contact your legislators, and to seek out values-based seafood providers through tools like the Local Catch Network’s seafood finder. Together, we can protect not only the wildlife and ecosystems we cherish, but also the integrity of our national food supply.