U.S. Fails to Inspect Farmed Fish Imports for Dangerous Chemicals
If the orange foam caused by Canadian aquaculture isn’t enough to scare you away from farmed fish, how about the presence of malachite green, a fabric dye suspected to cause cancer, in Chilean farmed salmon? This year, European countries seized dozens of tons of farmed salmon from Chile that were found to have been contaminated with malachite green, which was banned from the U.S. in 1991 but is still used in some countries as a cheap fungicide. For its part, the U.S. imports thousands of tons of Chilean salmon each year, and huge quantities of seafood from other nations, without testing for malachite green or other potentially dangerous chemicals used in foreign fish farms. Aquaculture took off during “a cowboy era of globalization and free market, and that has helped it escape regulation,” said Mike Skladany of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “The stuff has just come flooding in without any inspection to speak of.”
