World Aquaculture December 2019

28 DECEMBER 2019 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WA S.ORG of the Interagency Committee on Marine Science and Engineering (ICMSEE), asked the NRC to take a look at the future of aquaculture in the United States. In response, I formed a study committee under the leadership of DonWalsh. 2 The NRC/NAS published the committee’s report, Aquaculture in the United States: Constraints and Opportunities . The report’s key conclusion was that the primary constrains to the development of aquaculture in the United States were political and administrative rather than scientific and that the solution was to name the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as the lead agency. But, designating a lead agency was sensitive and problematic. Important programs, missions and activities across a number of agencies were perceived to be at risk under USDA leadership in aquaculture —mainly that emphasis on freshwater, commercial aquaculture interests would stifle support of everything else. Debates over this in Congress and among government agencies seemed endless and futile. Coordination Across Government Agencies Immediately following my work at the NRC, I was asked to work on the President’s Reorganization Committee, housed in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). I was assigned responsibility for identifying ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiencies of government programs in Agriculture, Food and Nutrition and Natural Resources, including aquaculture and fisheries. The recommendations we made included transfers of agencies and programs fromUSDA to the U.S. Department of the Interior (USDI), from the U.S. Department of Commerce (USDC) to USDA, fromUSDA to USDI, and so forth…macro changes, the creation of a separate Department of Fisheries and Oceans, transfers of various research laboratories and new policies regarding food inspection, to name a few. These were bold steps, and our nose count in the U.S. Senate revealed 55 against versus 45 for a consolidated reorganization bill that included all of our proposed changes. We decided a piecemeal approach to structural changes would be more likely to succeed. Over the years, many provisions proposed in that OMB study and elsewhere have come to pass, for example, consolidation of certain laboratories in USDA and establishing the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in a leadership role for long-term, mission-oriented aquaculture research. By 1978 I moved fromOMB to USDA to become Aquaculture Coordinator in the Office of the Secretary. My chief aims were to establish a clear aquaculture policy and to create or build aquaculture components or programs in the many agencies of the department. In that capacity I created a USDA-wide aquaculture work group. I also represented the Secretary of Agriculture as Chair of the federal agency-wide Joint Subcommittee on Aquaculture (JSA). The JSAwas created by the National Aquaculture Act to coordinate and plan aquaculture activities between and among many agencies. Within a couple of years, I became Assistant Director of the Science and Education Administration (SEA). SEAwas the “super agency” home to ARS, the Cooperative State Research Service (CSRS), the Extension Service (ES) and the National Agricultural Library (NAL). The combined assets of SEA included about 8,000 staff and 150 in-house research laboratories, all our external research and education grants to the experiment stations and cooperative extension services located in the land-grant universities in the United States. I maintained my Aquaculture Coordinator role in the Secretary’s office and was now in a unique position to help nurture aquaculture support within USDA and across the federal government R&D establishment. In 1980, after passage of the National Aquaculture Act, the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Interior signed a Memorandum of Understanding to use the JSA as the principal vehicle to coordinate and communicate aquaculture policies and recommendations, to clarify the roles of each department in aquaculture development and to establish Aquaculture Coordinator positions in each Department. The architects of this document were BobWildman in the Sea Grant office in USDC, Bob Stevens in the U.S. Fish andWildlife Service in USDI, and me at the USDA. The three of us created and served as an Executive Committee of the JSA so we could meet privately and collegially to solve difficult policy issues and thereby minimize friction during the full and formal meetings of the JSA. When Meryl Broussard came to USDA in the mid-1980s, he quickly became a trusted ally of this mini-JSA. With pesky jurisdictional stumbling blocks now cleared away, Meryl Broussard and I set about to build aquaculture programs and activities within USDA. The periodic FarmBills were the vehicle of choice. Creation of the Regional Aquaculture Centers In the early 1980s it became clear that policy and program progress within the USDA family of agencies warranted a bolder step to create a unified home for U.S. aquaculture interests. I opted to use the FarmBill as the vehicle to change the JSA leadership roles in PL 96-362, so as not to stir up formal opposition in various congressional committees. Roughly every four years a FarmBill provides guidance to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, including in research and development. So, in succession came the Food and Agriculture Act of 1977 that redefined the Department’s mission in “food and agricultural sciences” to include aquaculture, the Agriculture and Food Act of 1981 that included a new section under Subtitle L that authorized the establishment of four Regional Aquaculture Research Development and Demonstration Centers in the United States and the Food Security Act of 1985 that expanded the number of Regional Aquaculture Centers from four to five. It also amended the National Aquaculture Act of 1980 by designating the Secretary of Agriculture as the permanent Chair of the JSA. The creation of the four (and eventually five) Regional Aquaculture Centers began between Christmas and NewYear’s Eve 1980. TomAdams, then assistant to Bill Wampler (R-VA) called me to Capitol Hill to draft something “creative” about aquaculture his boss wanted to include in the FarmBill version he planned to introduce on the first day of the new Congress. Wampler was the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Agriculture. Interest in establishing a clear national U.S. policy for commercial aquaculture began in earnest when it dawned on a number of interested observers and members of the scientific community that we didn’t have one.