{"id":1079,"date":"2012-05-12T17:26:21","date_gmt":"2012-05-12T20:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/?p=1079"},"modified":"2012-05-12T17:26:21","modified_gmt":"2012-05-12T20:26:21","slug":"ralph-surette-on-salmon-farming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/?p=1079","title":{"rendered":"Ralph Surette on Salmon Farming"},"content":{"rendered":"

SALMON FARMING: AN INDUSTRY THAT NEEDS TO BE CAGED<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Ralph Surette: reprint\u00a0from Chronical Herald, May 12. 2012<\/em><\/p>\n

\nSerious salmon farming is coming to Nova Scotia. Wonderful news, you\u2019ve surely heard. Lots of jobs. A few people are against it, of course, but this shouldn\u2019t be a problem \u2014 just come-from-aways fretting about the views from their fancy properties.<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s how you understand it, think again.<\/p>\n

Salmon farming has gone from being a good idea on a modest scale to a pernicious excess worldwide involving noxious chemicals, harm to wild fisheries, lavish taxpayer subsidies and unwholesome government\/industry collusion.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s coming to Nova Scotia is what\u2019s going awry elsewhere. The recent wipeout of salmon farms in Shelburne Harbour by infectious salmon anemia \u2014 after the entire industry in Chile was similarly wiped out \u2014 may have perked your attention. The fact that you, the taxpayer, will be paying to restore the operation should perk it even more.<\/p>\n

Nova Scotia is late to salmon farming. Our bays are becoming available because of global warming. The fish in the first operations 35 years ago often froze. We have time, in other words, to do it right. Alas, the government, even as it prepares an aquaculture strategy, is giving little indication of that. Applications for cages have been rubber-stamped; regulations run over; a vast coalition of opponents from the commercial fishery, tourism, sports fishing and others wanting a moratorium on open-pen aquaculture until it\u2019s all worked out can\u2019t get the time of day from government, and so on.<\/p>\n

Nova Scotia is the next phase of operations for Canada\u2019s salmon farming multinational, Cooke Aquaculture, the largest in North America, which is finding things tricky in its main operations in New Brunswick. Ditto for Loch Duart, bursting out of Scotland, that wants to set up in Eastern Shore bays and inlets.<\/p>\n

In New Brunswick, Cooke is up for trial on 72 counts of dumping illegal substances after a two-year investigation into dead lobsters by Environment Canada in the salmon farming areas of the Bay of Fundy. Cooke CEO Glenn Cooke and two other executives are named. Penalties are up to three years in jail or a $1-million fine per count or both.<\/p>\n

Plus this, from recent hearings of the Senate fisheries committee in Ottawa. In 2010, the New Brunswick Fisheries Department OK\u2019d the use of a powerful chemical called AlphaMax against sea lice in the salmon cages, after some cursory tests. Sea lice are a big problem, and they get progressively immune to the chemicals used against them. They\u2019re also crustaceans, so poisons used against them will affect other shellfish. Suspicious agents from Environment Canada showed up, put dye in the chemical as it was being applied, and followed the plume as far as eight kilometres out, immersing caged lobsters in it as they went. The lobsters all died. A stop was put to its use.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the kicker. The Harper government is gutting the Fisheries Act and Environment Canada. In future, the committee heard, stopping such activities will be harder, maybe impossible.<\/p>\n

There are other problems.<\/p>\n

The caged salmon industry trades on the image of the leaping wild salmon. In fact, the nice pink you see on farmed salmon in the stores is food dye (\u201clucantin pink\u201d from BASF chemicals or \u201ccarophyll pink\u201d from Roche pharmaceuticals). In some cases, there are antibiotics and hormones. There was a bust-up in Britain this winter: cautions from health authorities, and a headline in the admittedly over-the-top Daily Mail that proclaimed \u201cpink poison.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aquaculture was meant to supplement declining wild stocks of fish. Mostly it has. But in the case of farmed salmon, it takes four to seven kilograms of feed to make one kilogram of salmon. The feed is fishmeal from herring mackerel, anchovies, Arctic krill and others along the food chain. Thus, it\u2019s far more destructive than helpful to the world\u2019s fisheries. Plus, almost invariably, wherever fish farms appear, wild salmon stocks disappear. The St. Mary\u2019s River and others of Eastern Nova Scotia are marked waters if Loch Duart gets its way.<\/p>\n

Not least, salmon cages are extremely polluting. It\u2019s like a sewer outfall wherever they establish \u2014 from excess feed and feces and sometimes heavy metals, like zinc and copper, from cage de-fouling agents.<\/p>\n

And the promise of jobs is largely illusory. According to Susanna Fuller, co-ordinator of the marine divisions of the Ecology Action Centre, even within aquaculture, salmon farming is near the bottom as operations become more automated. She has produced an analysis on behalf of the \u201cresponsible aquaculture\u201d coalition. It\u2019s available on the EAC website under \u201cmarine.\u201d It was created for the benefit of government. \u201cThey weren\u2019t giving us any information, so we gave them some,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The coalition, which includes most of the commercial fishery, don\u2019t want an end to salmon farming. They want it sustainable, an addition rather than a detriment to the wild fishery \u2014 an end, for example, to \u201copen-pen\u201d farming in favour of shore-based pens. The companies complain this is not economically feasible. A big mouthful for an industry which, says Fuller, has a 50 per cent rate of return and is stuffed silly with subsidies.<\/p>\n

Ralph Surette is a veteran freelance journalist living in Yarmouth County.<\/p>\n

(rsurette@herald.ca)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SALMON FARMING: AN INDUSTRY THAT NEEDS TO BE CAGED By Ralph Surette: reprint\u00a0from Chronical Herald, May 12. 2012 Serious salmon farming is coming to Nova Scotia. Wonderful news, you\u2019ve surely heard. Lots of jobs. A few people are against it, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aquaculture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1080,"href":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1079\/revisions\/1080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trepa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}