Blaming salmon farms for decline makes for one fishy tale
Gwyn Morgan, Report On Business Column, The Globe And Mail, May 31 2010
A small group of activists began an anti-salmon-farm walk at the northern tip of Vancouver Island on April 23. When they arrived at the provincial legislature in Victoria, 500 kilometres and two weeks later, more than a thousand were on hand to sign petitions calling for an end to open-net ocean salmon farms. Protest leaders included authors of reports arguing that the spread of parasites - called sea lice - from the farms were responsible for the decline of wild salmon.
In fact, a few weeks before those protests, Mark Sheppard, the provincial government's leading aquatic veterinarian, had testified before the House of Commons standing committee on fisheries and oceans, saying: " Contrary to what you hear or see in the media, sea lice in British Columbia are not a growing problem ... Lice abundance on both farmed and wild fry have actually declined for five consecutive years." The activists also claim that Atlantic farmed salmon interbreed and compete with native Pacific salmon, theories that are also refuted by marine scientists. That's not the only problem the protesters have with salmon farms. Protest leader Alexandra Morton decries the Norwegian ownership of many B.C. fish farms. "I think the Norwegians, frankly, should just go home ... the money will stay here; it will not go to [foreign] shareholders," she told the House committee last month. Apparently, Canadian ownership would bring back the salmon.
The one thing that salmon farmers and protesters agree on is that wild salmon stocks have declined precipitously. While pink (also known as humpback) and chum salmon are abundant, stocks of the species most critical to the commercial and sports fishery have plummeted. Coho and chinook returns are down more than 70 per cent since the early 1990s and the 2009 Fraser River sockeye run saw only 1.7 million fish return when more than 10 million were expected, prompting Prime Minister Stephen Harper to strike a public inquiry.
The inquiry will have no shortage of possible causes to examine. Some blame global warming, others the impact of dams on spawning fish, and even diseases spread from government hatcheries. A hike along silt-laden and sun-exposed spawning streams brings home the destructive legacy of now-outlawed logging practices. As for fish farming, the inquiry should look at what's happening to salmon stocks where farms are not a factor. For example, returns of Alaska's prized chinook "king" salmon were so low that the 2009 commercial fishing season was cancelled.
But standing high above the cacophony of this debate stands the elephant in the stream ... fishing by both humans and animals. B.C.'s harbour seal population has rocketed to more than 100,000 from 10,000 since the commercial harvest and predation control ended in the 1970s. And the population of the even more ravenous Stellar sea lion has grown to about 28,000, the highest in a century. Peter Olesiuk, a scientist with the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, has studied the staggering impact of seal and sea-lion predation. One study of Vancouver Island's Puntledge River found that only three dozen harbour seals killed an estimated 10,000 spawning adult salmon. Mr. Olesiuk also calculated that more than three million salmon fry were taken from the river as they swam toward the ocean the following spring. "They take 60 to 70 Chum salmon per minute; per seal ... they eat the fish like popcorn," the study said.
In his 1998 book Lament for an Ocean: The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fishery, Michael Harris documented the disappearance of the North Atlantic cod in the early 1980s. It's interesting that this fishery collapsed without the scapegoats now being blamed for decline of Pacific salmon. Rather than global warming, the 1980s followed a period of global cooling. And there were no fish farms operating. Calling the disappearance of Atlantic cod "a true crime story, " Mr. Harris spelled out the evidence against an array of suspects, including enormous foreign factory ships and fishers on spawning grounds. The verdict: Fishing technology had advanced to the point where "we were able to kill everything," and a profoundly dysfunctional regulatory policy failed to prevent it. At a 1997 Atlantic Vision Conference cited in the book, participant Vic Young enunciated an enlightened way forward: "We need ... fewer plants, fewer fishermen, fewer trawlers, fewer seals, less political interference, more control over foreign overfishing, and better harvesting technology and practices."
Policy makers for today's Pacific salmon fishery seem unable to learn these lessons. Their actions pay little heed to the fact that the sport fishery takes relatively few fish, doesn't damage fish habitat and is a vital contributor to the economies of coastal communities. By contrast, net economic returns from the commercial fishery are marginal thanks to a bizarre unemployment insurance qualification system and other policies that keep too many boats on the water. Habitat-damaging commercial fishing practices, such as bottom dragging, continue to be allowed. And an aboriginal fishery system is not only unfair, but creates dangerous conflict.
We live in a time when there seems to be one group or another campaigning against almost every human endeavour. Each group's actions have unintended consequences. Anti-meat campaigners helped drive consumer demand for fish, and it is farmed fish that supplies most of that demand. An unintended consequence of closing fish farms would be higher demand for wild fish, making efforts to control overfishing even more challenging.
B.C.'s salmon farms provide thousands of jobs in coastal communities devastated by the decline of commercial fish catches and the once-mighty forest industry. At more than $600-million annually, farmed fish are the province's biggest agricultural export. That's the good-news story that has been lost during the activists' photo ops on the legislature lawn.
