Fish, salmon farms and empty oceans

Ray Grigg
November 13, 2009
The Courier-Islander

Anyone who cares about wild salmon and tries to reconcile the tolerant attitude of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) to the environmentally damaging practices of salmon farming must confront a bewildering question. If DFO is responsible for the well-being of Canada's wild salmon stocks, why does it endorse salmon farming in principle and allow open net-pens in practice when such an industrial practice is a clear risk to wild stocks and causes demonstrable harm to the very species and habitat that DFO is legally mandated to protect?

This question seems unanswerable given the salmon farming industry litany of environmental transgressions -- either by intent, negligence or implication. The list of these transgressions is long. And DFO's tolerance of them is mystifying considering the damning evidence accumulating in BC and recorded in other places where salmon farming has a longer history.

The justification for this tolerance, however, may reside in a sobering logic that does make sense if we think large enough.

Globally, the industrial catch of wild fish from the oceans has peaked, despite more effort, more boats, more sophisticated fishing technology and the rising need of protein for a burgeoning human population. Marine biologists warn that current harvest rates are unsustainable and, unless reductions in catch occur, the world's oceans will be empty of fish by 2050. Meanwhile, the production of farmed fish -- of which salmon is a small percentage -- now exceeds the wild catch for the first time ever. Farmed fish are replacing our depleted supply of wild fish.

Concurrently, the emission of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is acidifying the world's oceans. About a third of the CO2 we emit from industrial activity is added to the atmosphere to cause global warming, a third is absorbed by plants and a third is dissolved into oceans. When carbon dioxide mixes with salt water, it forms carbonic acid, and this process is lowering the ocean's pH -- making it more acidic.

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