All talk and no action as fish farms kill off our wild salmon
Gerald Warner
If you want to promote decisive action, your best bet is to set up a working group – especially a tripartite working group.
It can be relied upon to produce butt-kicking conclusions like this: "This report has assessed the options for restoration (of West Coast salmon and sea trout fisheries] among the other possibilities for management intervention. However, it is not currently possible to recommend a specific approach, for either salmon or sea trout, because the underlying problem(s) remain undefined."
That classic piece of buck-passing indecision was the conclusion of a report from the Tripartite Working Group set up by the Scottish Government "to address problems common to salmon farming and wild salmon fisheries" on the question of "Restoration guidance for West Coast salmon and sea trout fisheries". Scotland's wild salmon and sea trout stocks have been devastated and the TWG is at a loss to understand why.
That is unfortunate, since it seems the three authors of the paper are the only people in Scotland who do not know the answer: salmon farming is destroying our wild salmon and sea trout. One must not say so, however, since salmon farming is very dear to the heart of Scottish Government. Decades ago it was seen as the successor to North Sea oil.
In its early, buccaneering days, the salmon farming industry rewrote the definition of "cavalier". Its response to health problems among farmed salmon was bigger and better chemical warfare. An article in The Ecologist claimed that, prior to the banning in 1999 of Dichlorvos (DDVP), a pesticide linked to cancer, Scottish salmon farms used up to nine million tonnes of the stuff. Such was the reputation of salmon farming that the World Wildlife Fund labelled it a "junkie industry".
Today it is projecting itself as the saviour of Scotland. "Economic benefits of salmon farming leap to £500 million" trumpeted a recent media release from the Scottish Salmon Producers' Organisation; the Scottish Government states the industry has a farm-gate value of around £350m. As against that, it is worth recalling that back in 1995, the net economic value of salmon angling in Scotland was estimated by the government at up to £430m. That sport has been badly damaged by fish farming.
Parasitic sea-lice breed in their millions in fish farms, then clouds of them attack salmon and sea trout returning from the sea to the rivers of their birth and literally eat them alive. Sea trout are in a much worse situation than salmon because they do not travel far from their home estuary. Anglers mourn the near-demise of trout fishing in famous rivers and lochs such as Loch Maree.
The effluent from fish farms amounts to more than is produced by the entire population of Scotland. Intensive feeding regimes for farmed salmon are having appalling environmental effects on marine life: for every tonne of salmon produced, at least three tonnes of sand eels, whiting and other wild fish are hoovered up from the seabed to make fish meal and oil. The marine desert this is creating is having an effect on puffins and other sea birds.
The genetic purity of wild salmon is being diluted by interbreeding with fish escaped from salmon farms, which also devour finite food stocks. "Measures to ensure fewer escapes" is one of the pious aspirations limply listed in the Scottish Government's recently published "Fresh Start for Aquaculture" strategy. It is a little late for such wish lists: more than 900,000 caged salmon on the West Coast escaped into the wild in 2005 alone.
This is an intolerable situation in a supposedly environmentally conscious country. The Scottish Government has enacted extravagant, "world-leading" targets to reduce carbon emissions; but it is presiding over the destruction of our noble salmon, the obliteration of sea trout and the depopulation of our rivers and lochs.
Yet fish farming is a declining industry, now mostly Norwegian-owned. As farms amalgamate and become more automated, the number of employees has fallen from 10,000 to not much more than 5,000. Chile is where the future of fish farming lies: its coast can support the industry with less environmental damage. It is not a long-term prospect in Scotland. Meanwhile, our genuinely sustainable angling industry is losing jobs for ghillies, boatmen and hotel staff as fishermen defect to Canada, Alaska and Russia.
The least that can be expected of the Scottish Government is that it should insist on more sensitive siting of salmon farms. The Salmon and Trout Association has launched an online petition demanding that "All sea-based fish farms are moved away from the estuaries of major wild salmon rivers to reduce the impact of sea-lice" and that "Salmon smolt farms are banned from operating within any wild salmon river system." It is well worth supporting.
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