“Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Give him a fish farm and he can destroy the fishery and the ecosystem altogether.”
That isn’t exactly how the old saying goes, but it’s a pretty fair synopsis of an open letter sent to the United Nations on November 3 by a group of scientists, First Nations leaders, environmentalists and fishers.
The blue-ribbon group of experts from Canada, Norway, the US, Chile and the United Kingdom are calling for the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization to take notice of what they call the “ruinous tactics” employed by industrial salmon farming in their countries.
The letter is the end product of a year and a half of international meetings, Alexandra Morton told The Hook in a recent phone interview. The final meeting was held last month near Campbell River.
“The research is showing more and more about the negative impacts of fish farming,” she said.
“Only eight to ten thousand pink salmon returned to the Glendale River this fall, on a river that should see up to 100,000 return. When that run left the river for the open ocean, more than 90 per cent of them were infested with sea lice.”
Critics of industrial fish farming believe that one of its major negative impacts on migrating wild salmon is sea lice infestation. The marine parasites flourish in the crowded pens of fish farms and spread out into the nearby waterways, where migrating salmon are infested.
Signatories to the letter say that industrial fish farming is ecologically devastating and socially destructive, and poses a threat to both local and world food security. They cite the 1995 United Nations Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries: “As a primary goal, aquaculture development should conserve genetic diversity and minimize negative effects of farmed fish on wild fish populations, while increasing supplies of fish for human consumption.” The signatories say today’s salmon farmers violate each of these principles.
The protest letter also highlights negative impacts of fish farming on indigenous people.
“They came into my territory and denied, delayed, distracted us from the truth for 20 years with no regard for their impact on the environment and my people,” said Bob Chamberlin, chief of the Kwicksutaineuk/Ah-kwa-mish First Nation in Broughton Inlet.
“I'm deeply ashamed as a Norwegian,” said Kurt Oddekalv of Green Warriors of Norway, also a signatory to the letter. “After damaging our wild salmon, the industrial salmon farmers are fouling the pristine waters of Canada and Chile. Nobody in Norway knows about this, but I will tell them.”
UPDATE: The New York Times picked up this story, here.
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G West
3 years ago
Nice piece by Cornelia Dean
IN tomorrow's New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/science/04prof.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=login
Fiat lux
3 years ago
According to the warped
According to the warped theories of our economists and politicians, anything that jacks up the GDP and gives profits to multinationals is "economic boom".
There are no debits and deductions in their calculations, for the GDP everything is an income, regardless of the damages, or consequences.
Then the cleaning up and the repairing of the damages and mess is more GDP, more "income".
Now, another question is whether the fishfarms could be closed, or cut back, according to WTO and other fraudulent free trade rules that demand that once a "commodity" crosses borders, the flow can not be cut back, only increased.
We sure are living in a world of drug induced fantasies and fraud. Even when the drugs are theories, ideologies and religions. The worst drugs in human history.
Especially the religion of the Money God, who liveth in computers and giveth His orders to His Priesthood of Economists.
Ed Deak. Big Lake.
egmont rapids
3 years ago
Freedom of speech
I can`t really comment on this subject,wild salmon are precious to me, these farms must go,period,by what ever means.
Similar to what is happening in the northeast section of this province.
Some actions are needed,despite what civil laws are written!
Peaceful (legal) means are prefered.
Right to Bear
3 years ago
...truth hurts.
...seeing the skinny bears eeking out a living on the Central Coast while they pace the same food routes their mom did, and as her mother did before her. Around and around what was their feeding grounds, what was their homes, in search for salmon, and yet few exist.
I wonder how many bears will die of starvation in their dens this winter? How many female bears will reabsorb their fetuses because their fat levels are too low to sustain a pregnancy?
We all know that Salmon Farms have negatively impacted these fragile lives, and still yet, not enough of us are fighting for their survival. Do we not know that their own survival depends on the health of these natural systems that exist in our world...
We are the forests, we are the oceans...
Bear
David Lewis
3 years ago
why appeal to the UN?
Its all great to see if the UN will condemn the worlds fish farms but what would be the result? Canada shredded its signature on the Kyoto Protocol and Canadians just reelected the government that was responsible. Where does anyone get the idea that what the UN does cuts ice here? Canada is going to be an international pariah when Obama changes US climate policy, we're going to be the last G7 country to be in denial.
Headline: UN condemns fish farms in BC, and the then NDP government, having taken power by opposing the economically ruinous less than 3 cent a liter carbon tax on gas will ignore it and blithely continue on collecting the tax revenue from the industry. Or the Liberals, still in power because gas prices declined so much no one saw 3 cents as a threat to their existence, ignore the UN and blithely continue on collecting the taxes from the industry.
North America was cleared for land farming long ago. I think 2% of the original grassland in Canada is still around. I saw a square mile pen in the Rockies where one of the last herds of the buffalo are.
The only plan the UN ever came up with to address the planetary population/ecological destruction problem was "Sustainable Development" which is a plan to address the problems caused by the dramatic and rapid expansion of civilization by rapidly and dramatically expanding the size of that civilization by a factor of five or ten.
Supposedly, this plan was rejected by intellectuals in North America but nothing was substituted, except a meaningless non-plan, "sustainablity". Anything is defined as more sustainable than the next guy's plan, and hence this must be fought for now, and in the vacuum of no global plan even being on the table nothing makes sense.
One overall framework anything like wild fish conservation has to have in order to be even theoretically conceivable is a stable atmospheric composition of greenhouse gases. There isn't a political party in Canada that has a plan that would not be described by the best science as anything other than a "recipe for global disaster".
So best wishes on getting the UN to condemn BC fish policy. I hope it works out for you. All this attention to NGO politics has left the political parties with inadequate policy, and a public debate that has yet to even understand that there is a problem.
Frank
3 years ago
Cutting off one's nose
The Carbon Tax has not and never will reduce emissions unless its raised to the point that low income people can't afford to heat their homes. Jimmy Pattison will heat his regardless of what they set the tax at.
This government has expanded fish farms and attacked people like Alexandra Morton.
For enviros the answer is clear, vote Liberal if you believe salmon and low income people aren't as important as sending Jimmy P a "price signal". LOL