Pro-fish farms: Salmon run proves lobbyists wrong
By Nelson Bennett, Richmond News September 10, 2010
The list of wild salmon's natural and manmade enemies is long.
Few theories, however, have gained more traction in recent years than the deleterious effect that disease and sea lice from fish farms has had on wild salmon stocks.
So what does a return of 35 million Fraser River sockeye do to that theory?
"I think wild sockeye have done more for salmon farms than millions of dollars and an army of PR people ever could have," says Vivian Krause, a former fish farm consultant who has made it her mission to expose what she alleges is a conflict of interest in the American and Canadian environmental movement and scientific community.
"The anti-fish farm lobby have been saying that the sockeye were at risk of extinction, and they have been proved wrong. They came back in droves. So, something fishy is going on here."
Raised in Kitimat and Kamloops, Krause spent 12 years working for the United Nations as a nutritional expert in Indonesia and Central America before returning to Canada in 2001 and ended up working for the aquaculture industry, which she said suffered from some very bad press.
She no longer works for the industry, she said, but has been lobbying on its behalf against an environmental movement that she accuses of being in the back pocket of American interests.
Three years ago, she sat on the board of a small non-profit organization for adoptive families and was looking for foundation money.
"I stumbled across a grant," she said. "Environmental organizations had been paid to shift consumer and retail demand away from farmed salmon. It explained to me why the information they give is selective. It's because they are supposed to sway market share."
Krause said Alaska's economy was hurt when the Japanese market switched from wild salmon to farmed salmon.
With the aid of philanthropists like the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Alaskan fishing industry has managed to recruit environmental groups to line up against the aquaculture industry.
"You've got American interests fighting Norwegian interests, and British Columbia is just the boxing ring," Krause said.
Asked what is in it for philanthropists like Moore to back Alaskan commercial fishermen, Krause said: "It's patriotism. It's nationalism. It's protectionism."
It's also something of a fight between salmon farming in B.C. and salmon "ranching" in Alaska.
"About 30 per cent of Alaskan 'wild' salmon is actually hatched in a plastic tray," she wrote in a letter to Science Magazine in response to two articles it had published on salmon farming, including one co-authored by Alexandra Morton, whose independent research on pink salmon has been widely cited.
"These salmon are not wild....Ranched salmon are fed pellets, grown in tanks and raised in net pens before they are put into the wild," Krause wrote.
In 2007, Science published an article on salmon farming and sea lice that included research by Morton and Martin Krkosek of the University of Alberta.
Krause has questioned the magazine's decision to publish the articles, saying its editor-in-chief, Dr. Donald Kennedy, has a conflict of interest because he was a trustee of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, which has provided funding to environmental organizations like SeaWeb, which she said had a research partnership with Krkosek.
She said organizations like the David Suzuki Foundation and others are also in a conflict because of the funding they receive from foundations that have an anti-aquaculture bias.
"We have been distracted by this whole controversy. It's a scientific scam," she said.
Krause said the conclusions many of these scientists and environmental groups have come to are not borne out by available data and research.
"They never ever measured sea lice at salmon farms," she said.
Morton says that's because the salmon aquaculture industry refuses to release that kind of information.
"It's online," Krause insists.
As for Morton's oft-cited research, particularly on sea lice in pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago, Krause said it is inconclusive.
Morton's research has shown that when salmon farms in the migration path of pink salmon are fallowed, the incidence of sea lice on those salmon drop.
"She has a correlation, but a correlation is not indicative of a causality," Krause said.
"I would agree, if the research shows what they say it does, close the farms. They should be banned," Krause said. "The problem is the research doesn't show what they say it does because they never ever measured sea lice at salmon farms.
"It is impossible for them to have done the research they claim to have done," Krause concludes.
