Scotland
The Bitter Harvest report details the pressures that fish farming is putting on Scotland's fragile marine environment and sets out a vision for a better-regulated industry in the future. WWF's main concerns include:
Nutrient Pollution: The release of fish faeces and uneaten food into inshore lochs pollutes these sensitive environments and is suspected of being connected to the occurrence of toxic algal blooms that have devastated the scallop industry in recent years.
Chemical Pollution: Through the release of chemicals to treat diseases and parasites in farmed fish, with unknown consequences for marine life.
Global Impact: Wild fish are being caught as far away as the Pacific Ocean to be crushed up into fish meal and fed to farmed salmon in Scotland.
Limited benefits for Scotland: 60% of the salmon industry is owned by a few big foreign multinationals that produce over 120 000 tonnes of fish annually. With increased intensification of the industry the production of salmon may have rocketed, but the benefits for local communities remain the same. Full and part time employment on salmon farms has dropped slightly from 1995 to 1999, yet salmon production increased by a massive 76% during the same period (SEERAD, 2000).
Norway
Escapes From Norway's Fish Farms Threaten Wild Salmon
File photo of Wild salmon in action.
by Wilfred Vuillaume
Oslo (AFP) Jan 19, 2007
Hundreds of thousands of salmon escape from Norwegian fish farms each year carrying parasites that pose a serious threat to wild salmon, a growing phenomenon that has fish farmers, environmentalists and authorities worried. Some 790,000 salmon and trout slipped through the nets last year, compared to 722,000 the previous year.
This despite the fact that the salmon are continuously monitored. Underwater cameras and divers are constantly on the lookout for small holes in the nets of the aluminium cages that lie 35 meters (115 feet) under the surface.
The escapes are "a crime against the environment", Peter Gullestad, the head of the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries, told AFP, adding: "Norway is facing its biggest ecological challenge."
The fish that escape from Norway's 1,000 fish farms, located in fjords and rivers along the 21,347 kilometers (13,264 miles) of coastline, threaten the maritime ecosystem.
"Salmon lice is the biggest threat" to stocks of wild salmon in the long term, explained Espen Farstad, a spokesman for the Norwegian hunting and fishing association NJFF.
The lice, which live in salt water and are known by the Latin name Lepeophtheirus salmonis, bite the salmon until they bleed, feeding off of the fish's mucus and causing the least resistant fish to die.
Most susceptible are young wild salmon swimming in the fjords and rivers before they head off to the open sea, as their immune systems are not yet fully developed.
The lice is a problem at all salmon farms around the world. In Norway, it poses a particular problem since fish is the country's second-largest natural resource export after oil and gas.
Also, as farmed salmon increasingly mix with wild salmon, the genetic composition of the latter changes.
"In the future, the entire genetic system of the wild fauna could be modified," Farstad warned.
"We are doing everything we can to prevent salmon from escaping from their cages and infecting the nearby rivers," insisted Bernt Wictor Haugen, a fish farmer in the Finnmark region in Norway's far north.
The industry is using frogmen, anti-lice baths, antibiotics, vaccines, and any other methods available to help fish farms and commercial fishing co-exist in harmony.
But for environmental organisations, not enough is being done.
"The fish farmers are not taking the problem seriously enough. The farms at fault should be punished," said Maren Esmark of the Norwegian branch of WWF.
She wants authorities to introduce severe sanctions on the fish farms. The complaints filed to the police are seldom followed up, according to Gullestad.
The fisheries ministry meanwhile says that the fish farm escapes are a top priority, as Norway has a reputation as a world leader to defend.
In 2006, fish farm exports totalled 18.7 billion kroner (2.2 billion euros, 2.9 billion dollars), up 24 percent from a year earlier, according to the Norwegian fisheries export committee EFF.
The increase is due primarily to rising demand for salmon and the arrival of cod and halibut farms.
Norway is Europe main's supplier of fish, both farmed and wild, with a market share of 62 percent in 2006.
And last year, fish farm exports for the first time exceeded exports from the traditional fishing sector, reaching 17 billion kronor.
In July, a special committee was set up by the fisheries ministry to improve security at the fish farms.
"Now all fish farm equipment has to be certified by the committee. A very strict inspection takes place once a year," said Rune Bildeng, an advisor to the fisheries ministry.
In order to meet the new demands, Norway's fish farms are slowly being turned into ultra-modern fortresses, resembling less and less the traditional fish farms.
"But a well-monitored salmon will always be better on the plate," insisted fish farmer Bernt Wictor Haugen.
Chile
To see fish farming at its worst, travel to Chile, where salmon farming has boomed in the past decade and generates $1 billion a year in export revenue. "A film of feed leftover made of fish oil, animal fat and transgenic soybean oil floats on the water around the salmon farms," says Ronald Pfeil, 67, a cattle farmer in Chile's remote Aysen region. "When the tide is low, the beaches stink."
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Fish Farming’s Growing Dangers
Under international pressure, Chile introduced strict new regulations in January. But the problems surrounding fish farming are complex, and some are only dimly understood. Daniel Pauly, 55, a professor of fisheries science at the University of British Columbia, has calculated that it takes 2 to 5 lbs. of anchovies, sardines, menhaden and the other oily fish that comprise fish meal to produce 1 lb. of farmed salmon, which he says makes no sense in a world trying to increase the amount of available protein. Kentucky State University biologist James Tidwell, 47, a former president of the World Aquaculture Society, points out, however, that wild salmon are bigger eaters than that — consuming at least 10 lbs. of fish to add 1 lb. in weight — and argues that harvesting large amounts of short-lived species like menhaden is no more harmful than mowing the lawn. "Fish-meal fish are nature's forage," he says. "Cropping them merely increases their productivity."
Ireland
Parasite infestation is another chronic problem of high-density seafood farms. One of the most damaging organisms is the sea louse, which breeds by the millions in the vicinity of captive salmon. In 1989 Peter Mantle, who owns a wild salmon and sea-trout sport fishery in Delphi on the west coast of Ireland, discovered that young trout returning to his river from the ocean were covered with lice that were boring through the trouts' skin and feasting on their flesh. The sea lice were breeding near newly installed salmon farms in the inlet fed by his river. By the time the salmon farmers started dosing their pens with anti-sea-lice chemicals, the sea-trout fisheries of the west of Ireland were effectively dead. "Sea-trout fishing was sustainable and eco-friendly," says Mantle, "but the salmon farms killed it off within a decade."
Impact on wild fish populations: Escaped salmon (on the West coast escaped farmed salmon now make up 22% of the 'wild' catch) alter the genetic make up of wild salmon, as well as infecting them with disease and parasites.
Maybe they should blame Alaska as well.