May 31, 2010 by Megan Adams

This morning in the provincial legislature, Liberal MLA Donna Barnett participated in a debate on aquaculture. She said that it is an area in which she is no expert, and that she listens to all sides of the issue - to scientists, to NGOs, to industry and to government. She thinks we need to focus on "facts not emotions", and that we have to "open up our thinking" about aquaculture. Ms Barneet, so focused on 'the facts' then read the article below in the house as her source of facts.

http://www.leg.bc.ca/hansard/video/live.asp?video=wven&toc=live

Blaming salmon farms for decline makes for one fishy tale

Monday, May 31, 2010
GWYN MORGAN, From the Globe & Mail
Gwyn Morgan is the retired founding CEO of EnCana Corp.

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.

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Dear Editors:

Heavily biased misinformed writing such as below damages the credibility of your paper.  Someone should have reviewed this piece with the scientists studying the collapse of wild salmon in BC.  This author has misused information by quoting the DFO scientist on seal impact in a highly localized special case situation. To extrapolate this to a major impact on wild salmon in BC is highly misinforming.

Mark Sheppard has not published a single paper on salmon farming. He works for a government agency tasked with supporting salmon farming that is coming under increasing scrutiny. His comments, are just that...comments and are not supported by the high lice numbers in areas of the BC coast this year. Your author failed to note international scientists are warning drug resistance is causing salmon farm companies to lose control of  sea lice to and release increasingly more toxic chemicals into the ocean in a losing arms race with this parasite.

Unlike your author I have met with the Norwegian fish farm CEOs  and understand they intend to continue expanding to meet shareholder demand even though science warns too many fish in pens causes disease epidemics that threaten wild public fisheries and salmon farming as per the Chilean experience.

There are no dams impacting the salmon that the Judicial Inquiry is investigating and commercial fishing is not a factor as the stock that collapsed was not fished.

Your author is unprofessionally cherry-picking in failing to note that Alaska and Russia are enjoying record returns of sockeye, which is the salmon species that triggered the judicial inquiry.

Ford and Myers 2007, show scientifically that wild salmon go into exceptional decline in the presence of salmon farms. This is because these operations violate natural laws by holding salmon stationary triggering pathogens to flourish.  To use the argument that BC should trade a $600 million industry that imports fish from Chile to feed their fish, while impacting a 1.6 billion dollar wilderness tourism industry with 40,000 jobs dependant on wild salmon makes this article look like an industry-paid ad.

There are solutions and Norway is not interested in them, but there are Canadian fish farmers who are.   Canadian fish farmers will absorb the lost jobs, while developing world-class technology and a farm fish product which is greeted with enthusiasm by the increasingly ethical fish consumer market. Large markets in BC are currently sourcing land-based farm salmon from Washington State.   BC is losing out on by supporting an industry which refuses to upgrade to meet environmental and consumer demand for non-destructive fish production methods. 

Alexandra Morton
Biologist, British Columbia