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Fish farmed in the ocean could soon be eating a steady, unnatural diet of GMO soy.

When you think of industrial agriculture, you might picture windowless factory farmbuildings or fields being blasted with pesticides. We may soon have to add oceanic aquaculture to the industrial ag equation if the soy lobby gets its way. Currently, major biotech-, pesticide-, and food-industry giants are pushing to use genetically engineered soy feed in fish farms located in pens in the ocean.

Currently, about 94 percent of soy grown in the United States is genetically engineered to survive heavy sprayings of pesticides. In fact, such high amounts of systemic pesticides are used that soy products actually contain legal levels of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup weedkiller. (Yes, you're eating it.) That's problematic, considering that Roundup has been linked to lowered nutrient content in food and health problems like infertility, obesity, and effects of hormone disruption. "Our seas are not Roundup ready," says Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. "Soy is being promoted as a better alternative to feed made from wild fish, but this model will not help the environment, and it will transfer massive industrial farming models into our oceans and further exacerbate the havoc wreaked by the soy industry on land—including massive amounts of dangerous herbicide use and massive deforestation."

A new report from Food & Water Watch and Food & Water Europe, titled "Factory-Fed Fish: How the Soy Industry Is Expanding into the Sea, outlines how using soy-based fish feed in place of wild fish in ocean fish farms will harm ocean habitat, fish, and consumers.

Like cows and other livestock, the digestive system of a fish isn't built to process soy. The result? Less-nutritious fish and serious ocean pollution: Eating this unnatural soy diet causes fish to produce excessive amounts of ocean-polluting waste that facilitates disease.

While converting wild-caught fish into fish meal and fish oil for use in fish farm operations stresses oceans—it takes 25 pounds of wild fish to add one pound of weight to a bluefin tuna raised on a fish farm—transitioning to soy also poses serious threats to oceans. (Note: Not all fish-farming operations are detrimental.

Ramping up soy production means more land dedicated to growing a single crop using huge amounts of fertilizers, which in turn imperils the fishing industry further: These chemicals are washed into waterways and eventually create dead zones in important ocean fishery spots, as they have in the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay.

Monterey Bay Aquarium currently focuses on the impact of using wild fish as feed, but a spokesperson said if the organization would start analyzing the impacts of alternative types of feed, they'd have to look at a whole host of other issues, including the indirect effects associated with planting crops to grow as fish feed instead of people food. one example: Brazil is known for burning down rainforests to create more land to grow monoculture crops. Rainforests store lots of carbon, and eliminating these important climate-stabilizing carbon stores has the effect of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and that leads to more acidic and unlivable ocean conditions.

Seek out and support safer seafood options, including:

• Domestic farmed shellfish. "They don't need wild-caught fish and they can actually be beneficial to the water they're raised in by acting as a filtration system to clean the water," explains Monterey Bay aquarium spokeswoman Alison Barratt.

• Wild-caught Alaskan salmon. High in healthy omega-3s and low in contaminants like mercury and PCBs, this is a healthy choice for you and for the oceans.

• Farmed Arctic char.

For more information, read 12 Fish You Should Never Eat.