New anti-salmon farming “coalition” founded on hypocrisy
Positive Aquaculture Awareness, February 15, 2012
The latest sound and noise against B.C. salmon farms could win an award, if they handed out awards for hypocrisy.
The Center for Biological Diversity – which has $10 million in assets and an army of well-paid eco-lawyers – has joined forces with perennial anti-aquaculture activists Alexandra Morton and Bob Chamberlin, as well as Zeke Grader, mouthpiece for Pacific coast American fishermen, to condemn salmon farming.
They have filed a petition with the Commission for Environmental Cooperation which oversees the North American Agreement On Environmental Cooperation, a side-treaty of NAFTA. Their petition claims that salmon farms in B.C. harm wild salmon, and should therefore all be removed from the ocean.
For one thing, it’s hypocritical for Jeff Miller from the Center for Biological Diversity to try and tell Canada how to apply the Fisheries Act to shut down ocean aquaculture, while his own country is currently trying to establish legislation to encourage the growth of ocean aquaculture.
And for another thing, the “us versus them” language from Grader is hypocritical. All human activities in the ocean have impacts, aquaculture as well as fishing. It does Grader no good to try and finger B.C. salmon farms as a scapegoat, when there are clearly many human activities which can have an impact on wild salmon.
But only aquaculture poses a real economic threat. America imports most of its seafood, more than $10 billion per year, and nearly half of that is farmed.
This petition is a waste of time and ink, and hopefully the Commission for Environmental Cooperation will see it for what it is – a cheap, thinly-veiled attempt to use environmental language to put trade restrictions on Canadian farmed salmon, thus guaranteeing American fishermen more shelf space and higher prices for their fish.
