Fish farm fight fizzles
Arguments against salmon farming in British Columbia are getting fewer, but wilder as some of the previous arguments against the activity are recycled but quickly dispelled or at least argued against.
FishfarmingXpert, Opinion, Odd Grydeland, February 22, 2011
The fact that the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association (BCSFA) has been running a series of television and newspaper ads might also have something to do with it, but the biggest boost to their image was given to the salmon farmers free of charge by Mother Nature, when tens of millions of sockeye salmon returned to spawn in the Fraser River last summer. All of a sudden, the wild salmon wasn’t being decimated by the evil salmon farms and their lice-shedding Atlantic salmon after all. But of course- when the late run chum salmon failed to show up in good numbers, fingers are being pointed again.
So old arguments are being recycled. The issue of contaminants in salmon has been dug out of the waste basket again. Following the hammering a 2004 study took after claiming that farmed salmon was contaminated with PCB’s and other contaminants to the point people shouldn’t eat the fish more than once a month, some environmental groups still use this as a publicity tool. Although as Vivian Krause said in a letter to the Vancouver Sun today, some ENGO’s have started to remove some of these claims from their web sites;
Several years ago David Suzuki said that he uncovered the "fact" that "B.C. farmed salmon is heavily contaminated with PCBs and other toxins." His study had only eight fish, and mercury levels were higher in the wild salmon. PCBs are in all foods. In the Suzuki Foundation's study, farmed salmon had less than three per cent of the tolerable level. Tuna and sardines have higher levels of PCBs than farmed salmon, Harvard research shows. The David Suzuki Foundation claims sea lice originating from salmon farms put wild salmon at risk of extinction but sea lice levels at salmon farms were never measured.
Sea lice are found on many species of wild fish, and a method to trace their origin simply doesn't exist. When concerns were raised with the David Suzuki Foundation about inaccurate and false statements with regards to PCBs in farmed salmon, and sea lice, 20 online articles and press releases were quietly removed from the foundation's website but the foundation never bothered to publicly retract its false and misleading information.
Another old argument is that the B.C. salmon farming industry is being heavily subsidized by senior governments, the latest salvo fired by another representative of the David Suzuki Foundation, to which Mary Ellen Walling, Executive Director of the B.C.S.F.A replied- also in today’s Vancouver Sun; “As I said in my letter, B.C.'s salmon farming industry is not subsidized by the government. While there are some research partnerships into innovation that receive direct targeted funding, companies here support themselves through their regular operations”.
In a second recent contribution to the Letters Page in the same paper, Ms. Walling stated that; “Not only has it been shown that Pacific salmon are resistant to damage from sea lice once their scales are fully developed, but a study published in December compared sea lice data directly to returns of pink salmon in the Broughton and showed there was no relation between lice levels on farms and wild salmon returns”, to which the ENGO Watershed Watch Salmon Society responded; “Smolts with scales, and larger than juvenile sockeye, have been absolutely decimated by farm-source lice in Europe”. Both of these statements have some good resemblance of the truth, but it has been shown that the situation between sea lice and Pacific salmon is vastly different than that between sea lice and Atlantic salmon (and trout) in the Atlantic Ocean.
