Don’t Cage Our Oceans and a broad coalition of stakeholders have spoken up against the Marine Aquaculture Research and Advancement (MARA) Act, recently introduced by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI). This new bill would accelerate development of industrial-scale, carnivorous finfish farms in the open ocean while framing it as “assessing the viability” of offshore aquaculture via commercial-scale “demonstration projects.” Currently, these operations do not exist in U.S. federal waters and Congress has not explicitly approved a process for allowing them. If the MARA Act passes, it will pave the way for an unprecedented experiment in our oceans.

Niaz Dorry, executive director of the North American Marine Alliance and the National Family Farm Coalition said of the bill, “the MARA Act is a carbon copy of the worst aspects of industrial land farming. As someone who’s worked across land and seafood systems for years, I can tell you that the same big agribusinesses bleeding family farmers dry are the ones leading lobbying efforts to replicate this madness on our ocean. And that’s no coincidence since they stand to profit. This greed-driven model of food production will lead us to ecosystem collapse and push our community-rooted food producers to the brink. It’s a false solution to a broken system and treats our ocean like a toilet instead of the shared public resource it is. If we want real food sovereignty, we must invest in real fishing and farming families who’ve been faithfully feeding us for millennia, not corporations trying to turn our oceans into shares on Wall Street.”

Click here to read more and see quotes from a wide range of fisherfolk, shellfish farmers, environmental advocates, and chefs.