NOAA 2008 Budget Request

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NOAA ANNOUNCES 2008 BUDGET REQUEST

Feb. 5, 2007 — Retired Navy Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Ph.D., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator, today announced highlights of President Bush's proposed 2008 budget for the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lautenbacher said NOAA's request totals $3.8 billion or an increase of 3.4 percent over the administration's 2007 request.

"The President's budget makes a substantial investment in our oceans that will pay dividends for years to come," said Lautenbacher. "We will be able to make great progress in the goals laid out in the President's Ocean Action Plan of ensuring sustainable use of ocean resources, protecting and restoring marine and coastal areas and enhancing ocean science and research."

Sustainable use of ocean resources + $25 million:
- Establish the regulatory framework for environmentally sustainable commercial aquaculture opportunities.
- Improvements for better management of aquaculture harvests.
- Support of the new and expanded requirements of the Magnuson-Stevens Management Reauthorization Act of 2006.
- Additional funding for observer programs and market-based approaches to fisheries management.

News Audio (mp3)
NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher media teleconference briefing in Silver Spring, Md., on NOAA 2008 budget request.

Support for the President's U.S. Ocean Action Plan

- Protection and restoration of marine and coastal areas + $38 million
- Enforcement and management of the newly designated Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument.
- Funding to restore nearly 1,000 stream miles for endangered Atlantic salmon and other species.
- Klamath River salmon recovery.
- Competitive grant programs focused on the Gulf of Mexico Alliance coastal resource priorities.

Climate Monitoring and Research

- Support for the National Integrated Drought Information System +$4.4 million.
- Support for the U.S. Integrated Earth Observation System +$0.9 million.
- Research to understand the link between ocean currents and rapid climate change +$5 million.
- Enhance computational support for assessing abrupt climate change +$1.0 million.

Read the Entire Story at NOAA News Online

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Aquaculture Operations

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Aquaculture oversight pushed
By Sean Hao, Advertiser Staff Writer

The United States needs to better regulate aquaculture operations, which are expected to grow fivefold into more than a $5 billion industry by 2025, according to a report released yesterday.

At present, the aquaculture industry, which includes 70 Hawai'i operations, provides about half of all seafood consumed in the United States. However, the nation's growing reliance on ocean farming operations will require new standards and practices to ensure protection of marine ecosystems, according to the Marine Aquaculture Task Force, a group of researchers, educators and aquaculture operators.

"In just a few years, most of the seafood we consume will come from aquaculture," said task force member Daniel Benetti, an associate professor and the director of aquaculture at the University of Miami. "The question is not whether we should endorse it. The question is how and where we should do it."

Read the entire article.

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Demand for Seafood Likely to Pressure Aquaculture into New Developments

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Growing Demand for Seafood Likely to Pressure Aquaculture into New Developments

NewswireToday - /newswire/ - Palo Alto, CA, United States, 01/29/2007 - Frost & Sullivan (ti.frost.com) finds that Aquaculture - Global Developments provides a thorough examination of fish farming and aquaculture.

The last three decades have seen the aquaculture industry develop into one of the fastest growing food producing sectors in the world. The industry today is extremely diverse and contains a wide variety of systems ranging from small ponds to large-scale commercial systems. The exponential rate at which the world population is expanding is contributing toward making culture fisheries more important than ever as a reliable source of food and resources.

Frost & Sullivan (ti.frost.com) finds that Aquaculture - Global Developments provides a thorough examination of fish farming and aquaculture.

"The growth of the aquaculture industry is vital for meeting the world's growing appetite for fish and other seafood," says Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst Kasturi Nadkarny. "If the aquaculture industry manages to overcome the environmental concerns and the social and economical challenges plaguing it, it could be instrumental in narrowing the widening gap between the demand and supply of seafood."

A recent report from Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reveals that by 2030, maintaining the present-day consumption levels will require an additional 40 million tons of fish. The wild fish populations will be incapable of meeting this demand, putting an onus on the aquaculture industry to boost its production to compensate for this gap in supply and demand.

On the flip side, intensive shrimp farming results in several tons of organic waste within a single shrimp-farming crop. Most of these wastes are in the form of stable organic compounds that are difficult to be broken down into simpler forms and cannot be put to use by the phytoplankton through photosynthesis. The oxidation of these compounds results in the depletion of the dissolved oxygen content in the shrimp ponds. Further, the generation of toxic metabolites such as nitrite, ammonia, methane and hydrogen sulphide makes the soil acidic, damages the gills and tails of the fish, affects their metabolism, causes blue shrimp syndrome owing to nutritional deficiency and disrupts the molting process.

"This is mainly responsible for the high mortality rates in aquaculture shrimp farming and to add to this issue, shrimp farms are always located in close proximity of each other, making it easy for diseases to spread from one farm to another and making it difficult to be controlled," explains Nadkarny. "In addition, although most nations have the scope to considerably enhance their aquaculture production for meeting the global demand for seafood, fish farmers lack sufficient technical information that is required to improve practices aimed at higher quality and yield."

Aquaculture - Global Developments is part of the Technical Insights Food and Beverages Subscription, and it gives an overview of emerging trends in the aquaculture landscape that involves key drivers, challenges, restraints, and analysis of adoption trends.

Aquaculture - Global Developments
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Keywords: Aquaculture, fishing, fish farming, sea food, environmental concerns, Food and Drug Administration, FDA, shrimp farming, organic waste, organic aquaculture, fish stocks, phytoplankton, photosynthesis, toxic metabolites, nitrite, ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulphide

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