Crystal Canney is executive director of the Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage Foundation. Dwayne Shaw is executive director of the Downeast Salmon Federation. 

President Trump’s calls to “supersize” the American aquaculture industry, outlined in a May 14 Guardian article, are increasingly framed as a path toward seafood independence and domestic food security. But in places like Maine, where industrial salmon farming already operates, the reality is far more complicated.

After a 2017 net-pen collapse in Washington state released hundreds of thousands of farmed salmon into public waters, that state moved to phase out non-native salmon farming.

Maine is now the last place in the United States where Atlantic salmon are raised in open ocean pens, in the same coastal waters where endangered wild Atlantic salmon migrate and persist. As a result, Maine has become a primary foothold for Cooke Aquaculture, a Canadian multinational and one of the world’s largest producers of farmed salmon.

The environmental concerns surrounding industrial salmon farming are not theoretical. In the context of ocean farming, they include nutrient pollution from fish waste and excess feed, the spread of parasites and disease in densely stocked pens and the risk of farmed fish escaping and interacting with wild populations that have evolved over thousands of years.

These challenges have been documented in aquaculture operations around the world and are increasingly part of the public conversation in Maine. Recent scrutiny of the industry, including a lawsuit brought by the Conservation Law Foundation alleging violations of federal environmental standards, has further raised questions about oversight and accountability.

But beyond environmental concerns lies a fundamental economic question: who benefits?

Cooke leases roughly 647 acres of Maine’s public waters for approximately $100 per acre annually, or about $64,700 a year. For a company reporting billions in global revenue, that is a remarkably low cost for access to a shared public resource. While aquaculture operations do provide some local employment, the broader financial picture suggests that a significant share of profits flows out of state and, in this case, out of the country.

For generations, Maine’s coastal economy has been shaped by people who live on the coast, work on the water and reinvest in their communities. That model depends not only on economic output, but on stewardship, local knowledge and a direct relationship with the marine environment. Industrial aquaculture introduces a different model, one that more closely resembles the consolidation seen in industrial agriculture, where production is centralized and decision-making is removed from the communities most affected.

Beneath the rhetoric of “seafood independence” lies a familiar pattern. Industrial-scale aquaculture concentrates production in ways that can strain coastal ecosystems and compete with existing fisheries for space. Lobstermen and other working waterfront users must navigate around these sites, while local communities absorb the environmental and economic risks associated with large-scale operations.

This dynamic reflects what many critics describe as an extraction economy: a system in which corporations derive value from natural resources while leaving local communities to bear the long-term costs. Comparisons to the “chicken boom” of the 1950s are not hyperbolic. They are warnings about what happens when food production becomes increasingly consolidated, industrialized and disconnected from the people and ecosystems expected to sustain it.

The question is not whether America should produce seafood. Of course it should. The question is whether the future of our coastal waters belongs to local communities or foreign multinational corporations operating floating feedlots while only a minuscule amount of money remains in the state and millions of dollars flow elsewhere.

If public waters are increasingly used for private production, the public should expect a meaningful return, both economically and environmentally. Otherwise, what is framed as a strategy for national resilience begins to look more like a continuation of corporate resource extraction, with profits flowing elsewhere and the long-term consequences left behind.

That is not seafood independence. It is the privatization of public resources and the outsourcing of environmental risk beneath the surface of the sea, while the overwhelming financial rewards flow to a foreign multinational corporation like Cooke Aquaculture instead of Maine’s coastal communities. In the end, the Cooke types benefit the most.