Fwd: FW: [Food-news] Between farming and fishing, do our salmon stocks stand a chance?

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> Editor's Note: This review article from the Literary

> Review of Canada

> tells the dramatic story of the shift from wild

> salmon fishing to the

> salmon farming industry over the past couple of

> decades. Threats of salmon

> farming practices range from the spread of illnes

> from farmed to wild

> species, extinction, environmental devastation,

> threats to other ocean

> species and to human health. What to do, especially

> when the alternative

> is often presented as threatened wild fisheries and

> unpredictable

> livlihoods for fisherfolk? Can choosing to farm

> different species yield

> less damage? Labelling and sustainable approaches to

> fisheries and

> farming, such as that represented by the Marine

> Stewardship Council

> (www.msc.org) are one promising development.

> Foodnews invites readers to

> post comments on this topic at www.foodnews.ca.

>

>

> http://www.reviewcanada.ca/

>

>

> A Stain upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming

> Stephen Hume, Alexandra Morton, Betty C. Keller,

> Rosella M. Leslie, Otto

> Langer and Don Staniford

>

> Salmon Wars: The Battle for the West Coast Salmon

> Fishery

> Dennis Brown

>

> Atlas of Pacific Salmon: The First Map-Based Status

> Assessment of Salmon

> in the North Pacific

> Xanthippe Augerot

>

> An Undersea Catastrophe

> Between farming and fishing, do our salmon stocks

> stand a chance?

>

> Alanna Mitchell

>

> September 2005

>

> Within the space of two decades, the salmon we eat

> have gone from being

> mainly caught on the high seas to being mainly

> raised in pens. It has

> actually become a challenge to find fresh or frozen

> wild salmon in

> Canadian stores and restaurants. One of the tricks

> these days is to

> realize that anything labelled " Atlantic " has come

> from a farm, while most

> of the tinned stuff is still caught in the wild by

> fishers.

>

> The magnitude of this event in the history of humans

> is hard to

> overestimate. It is the first time we have been

> able—with whatever

> success—to domesticate a wild carnivore for mass

> consumption, despite

> thousands of years of failed attempts. (Yes, salmon

> are carnivores, living

> primarily on zooplankton when small and then on

> larger marine animals and

> fish as they mature.)

>

> According to natural historian Terry Glavin, who

> wrote the introduction to

> A Stain upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming,

> edited by Stephen Hume

> and several others, this fact is " arguably as

> significant as the epochal

> change ushered in by the neolithic revolution more

> than 10,000 years ago …

> It is an experiment, one might say. And by so

> intensively interfering in

> the process of natural selection, by subjecting

> salmon to such elaborate

> methods of artificial selection, by genetic

> tinkering and by long-term

> selective breeding, we are creating a wholly new

> species … It is properly

> understood as an obligate parasite species, like

> cows or chickens. "

>

> And, as Jared Diamond will tell you in Guns, Germs

> and Steel: The Fates of

> Human Societies, finding plants and animals to

> domesticate has been a

> preoccupation for humans ever since they started

> picking wild berries.

> There have not been that many in the whole course of

> time.

>

> In other words, it is not easy to find wild species

> that can successfully

> be raised for food. And there has never been a meat

> eater this near the

> top of its food chain that has fallen into that

> category. Think of humans

> trying to raise eagles, for example—or wolves or

> sharks or lions—for food.

>

> Hard to imagine? That's because predator meat eaters

> are made to run or

> fly or swim huge distances, fight for their own

> feed, rule whatever

> ecosystem they happen to be in. They are by nature

> goers, doers.

>

> Which is not to say that raising salmon successfully

> could not work. It is

> simply that so far, it hasn't. And history would

> tell us that it is highly

> unlikely. Even quixotic.

>

> What was the reason to try salmon? Why not herring

> or tilapia or another

> fish lower on the food chain? To me, that is one of

> the critical questions

> here. Other countries have made some headway trying

> to farm these fish

> species and others. But Canada, Chile, Norway and

> Scotland have stuck to

> Atlantic salmon.

>

> The only answer I get from these books is that the

> Atlantic salmon spawn

> simply happened to be available. That availability

> coincided with the

> Canadian and British Columbia governments deciding

> that farmed fish were

> an important economic development mechanism. As A

> Stain upon the Sea and

> Dennis Brown's Salmon Wars: The Battle for the West

> Coast Salmon Fishery

> tell us, this economic idea has had serious costs

> ever since it began

> playing out through the creation of fish farms.

>

> These costs arise mainly because the cage-like

> salmon pens are set up

> along coasts in the ocean. That effectively means

> using the surrounding

> ecosystem as a living garbage pit for the cocktail

> of chemicals and wastes

> that farms exude. It is the marine equivalent of

> telling factories they

> can pollute the air at will.

>

> Farmed Atlantic salmon have also escaped in vast

> numbers from their pens

> into the Pacific Ocean. There is some evidence that

> they are establishing

> a foothold there, at the expense of native species

> of salmon.

>

> The ecological effects of this are unknown, which is

> one of the things

> that makes salmon farming such a dangerous

> experiment. Will some species

> of native Pacific salmon, already in a fragile state

> from the long list of

> assaults on their living space, eventually die out?

> This has been the

> pattern in other ecosystems when invasive new

> species have been

> introduced. It is one of the leading causes of

> extinction across the

> world. It would be sane to have thought of this

> before the experiment

> began, and long before the Atlantics were able to

> slip out of their pens

> by the hundreds of thousands.

>

> Then there is the effect on sea lions and seals.

> Naturally, when tasty fat

> salmon are congregated in pens, their predators will

> gather there too,

> hoping for a meal. As Otto Langer, a former staff

> biologist with the

> Department of Fisheries and Oceans, relates in his

> chapter of A Stain upon

> the Sea, the government’s response was to sell

> salmon farmers a $5 permit

> to kill seals and even the endangered Steller's sea

> lions. It ended up a

> freefor-all.

>

> And then there are the chemicals. Don Staniford,

> author of another chapter

> in A Stain upon the Sea, describes in chilling

> detail what he calls a

> " chemical arms race " to maximize fish farm profits.

> Wild animals, kept in

> close quarters in captivity, get sick. This is

> mainly due to the stress on

> their physical systems from being cooped. It is true

> of cattle, of pigs,

> of chickens. And it is true of salmon.

>

> So the farm salmon are horribly afflicted with

> parasitic sea lice, which

> in turn spread to wild salmon. In the disgusting

> case from 2001 catalogued

> by the scientist Alexandra Morton in her chapter of

> A Stain upon the Sea,

> lice are the prime suspect in the extermination of a

> whole generation of

> juvenile pink salmon swimming to the sea in the

> Broughton Archipelago in

> British Columbia. It was the most rapid crash of a

> fish species so far

> catalogued by science.

>

> The infestation was so catastrophic that some of the

> individual tiny pinks

> swam back from the ocean to the rivers, only to die

> there of the lice.

> This is a grotesque reversal of the natural order,

> because evolutionary

> instinct normally drives young salmon to make the

> journey from the fresh

> river to the salt ocean, and they only return to the

> fresh water as adults

> to spawn and die. It is a powerful metaphor for the

> perversity of the

> current farming situation.

>

> The farmed fish get fungi and infections, as well as

> parasites. And the

> farmers use chemicals and antibiotics to try to keep

> them healthy enough

> to sell. But the chemicals, some applied straight

> into the ocean pens and

> not even intended for use in water, affect other

> living creatures, too.

> Those meant to kill sea lice, for example, poison

> other sea creatures with

> shells. It is all considered collateral damage.

>

> And consider the SalmoFan. At first I thought it was

> a Monty-Pythonesque

> spoof, but it isn't. The problem is that farmed

> salmon flesh is an

> unappealing grey compared to the pinks of the wild.

>

> Similar in concept to the fans of paint colours you

> look at to choose the

> perfect red for your dining room, the SalmoFan tells

> the salmon farmer how

> much artificial pink dye is needed to make the flesh

> of a batch of farmed

> Atlantics the colour chosen from the fan. For

> example, the pinkest is a

> 34. The least pink is a 20. So a farmer can decide

> that a certain batch of

> Atlantics is going to be a lovely 33 and the next,

> perhaps a paler 22.

>

> The pinker the flesh, the more expensive the

> chemicals. But, of course,

> the higher the price the fish fetches on the market.

> In some cases, the

> cost of the dye is as much as a third of the cost of

> the salmon’s feed.

>

> This is one case where the chemicals used in farming

> salmon can ultimately

> affect those cooking them on the barbecue, since

> these dyes have been

> linked to damage of the retina in the human eye.

> They were banned from

> fish farming use in the European Union in 2003 after

> a “damning scientific

> opinion” published the previous year described the

> human retinal damage.

> But they are still used here in Canada and in other

> countries,

> says Staniford, to colour fish not destined for

> European plates.

>

> At the same time as this frightening experiment in

> fish farming is going

> on, the wild fishery is in trouble. In Salmon Wars,

> Dennis Brown, a

> heavyweight with the United Fishermen and Allied

> Workers Union who was a

> fishery policy advisor for the B.C. government,

> catalogues the ups and

> downs of those involved in fishing for their salmon

> instead of growing it.

>

> It is an ugly story, full of twists, turns,

> betrayals and folly. Brown

> tells it as a fact-stuffed, meticulously catalogued

> polemic from the point

> of view of the unionized fishers, which gives his

> account the ring of

> self-justification. Wild fish are here reduced to

> tonnages and pieces and

> livelihoods and escapements. The rapacious canneries

> and double-speaking

> governments are the enemies. The fish are a product,

> although a totemic,

> romantic one. And the inescapable conclusion is that

> the people who rely

> on the Pacific salmon fishery are in terrible

> trouble, along with the wild

> fish themselves.

>

> So we have questionable fish farms on one hand and

> the beleaguered wild

> fishery and fishers’ livelihoods on the other.

>

> But the real salmon story, the important one, is

> told in the magnificent

> Atlas of Pacific Salmon: The First Map-Based Status

> Assessment of Salmon

> in the North Pacific by Xanthippe Augerot.

>

> The real story is global. It tells us that more than

> 60 percent of the

> world market in salmon is farmed. The turning point

> was 1997 when, for the

> first time, more salmon were raised in the world

> than caught. Norway, with

> by far the biggest production of farmed salmon, now

> has few populations of

> the wild Atlantic variety.

>

> The real story is that Augerot's statistical

> analysis of more than 7,500

> stocks, or individual populations, of Pacific salmon

> across seven species

> (chum, pink, sockeye, chinook, coho, masu and

> steelhead) shows that 11.7

> percent are at high risk of extinction while another

> 10.9 percent are at

> moderate risk. That means that roughly a quarter of

> the existing salmon

> stocks are in danger. And that’s not to mention the

> 278 populations that

> Augerot estimates have already gone extinct for a

> variety of reasons,

> including loss of habitat.

>

> Nor is it to talk about how climate change might

> affect these fish and

> other species, or logging, or oil and gas

> exploration, or dams, or other

> forms of human development.

>

> Augerot argues lucidly and persuasively - this book

> is a stunning

> accomplishment - that the salmon populations have to

> be looked at in their

> entire ecosystem, across the countries that cradle

> the north Pacific. That

> means Canada, the United States, Russia, Japan,

> China and South Korea. It

> means setting up an international monitoring

> strategy that will watch the

> trends, let us know there is trouble before the

> populations fall

> irreversibly.

>

> Had we had such a strategy for cod, we might have

> retained a thriving

> fishery instead of the one now marked by regional

> extirpation. On the

> other hand, if, as rumour has it, the fights over

> cod were anywhere near

> as political as the salmon wars, no strategy in the

> world could have saved

> the stocks.

>

> Consider the even bigger picture. Globally, about 90

> percent of the

> populations of every single large fish in the ocean

> have been fished out

> over the course of just 50 years. (In the case of

> the eastern cod, that

> figure is 99 percent. That’s why the cod off the

> Grand Banks are

> commercially extinct, perhaps forever.) That seminal

> finding, released in

> the last few years in a major scientific paper by

> Dalhousie University’s

> Ransom Myers and Boris Worm, has rocked marine

> biologists. No one knew how

> bad things really were. And this since only 50 years

> ago, about the same

> time Jacques Cousteau was first showing television

> viewers the marvels of

> the undersea world. Compared to their numbers a

> couple of hundred years

> ago, the collapse of the sea’s main fish is likely

> even more drastic.

>

> At the same time, the demand for fish on the plate

> has increased along

> with the human population. Fewer fish. More people.

> Aquaculture that in

> some cases is actually harming wild populations of

> fish. The spectre of

> even more catastrophic collapses of wild

> populations.

>

> Something has to give.

>

> It seems clear that humans are going to have to do a

> better job of fish

> farming than they have so far. Past experience shows

> that when we rely on

> wild species for food, the wild things eventually

> die out. Think of bison,

> auks, all the dozens of big slow creatures that went

> extinct on each

> continent in lockstep with the arrival of Homo

> sapiens. Part of the

> solution for the future is to farm fish in a

> sustainable, healthy way. It

> may end up not being salmon, but rather another form

> of marine protein

> that is lower on the food chain. And rather than

> attempting to give

> fishermen a solid income to last out their years,

> the main goal must be to

> make sure there is enough high-quality food to

> support the world

> population and that the marine ecosystems, which

> support human life (and

> not just fishers), are restored to health.

>

> This undoubtedly will mean a far smaller commercial

> fishery. It may turn

> into an artisanal effort instead of a corporate one.

> Pricing and marketing

> of fish may have to change. Dramatically.

>

> Fish farming certainly will. Although, as Augerot

> notes, fish farmers are

> dosing their livestock with less antibiotic than

> they did a few years ago,

> the problems of open ocean pens may be

> insurmountable.

>

> How about land-based tanks or walled underwater

> tanks? How about not

> pouring this wash of toxic chemicals into the open

> ocean and, instead,

> taking care of it in a more thoughtful way? How

> about, at the very

> minimum, some labelling of what exactly is in these

> farmed fish and how

> they are grown? And is anybody apart from Augerot

> thinking about a

> certification system, like the one used all over the

> world to inform

> consumers that lumber has come from sustainably

> harvested trees?

>

> The oceans are the great unexamined ecological

> catastrophe of our planet.

> Scientists across the world are united in a rush to

> understand even the

> most basic mechanisms of marine biological systems

> before it is too late.

> And we, the terrestrial dolts, are still fighting

> about which fishing boat

> gets what percentage of the Pacific salmon catch.

>

> Alanna Mitchell is the author of Dancing at the Dead

> Sea: Tracking the

> World’s Environmental Hotspots published by Key

> Porter Books in 2004 and

> by University of Chicago Press and Transworld Books

> UK in 2005.

>

>

>

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