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No planet B
Something smells fishy
I knew there were problems with sea-farmed salmon, but after seeing the damage inflicted by life in an ocean pen, I will never buy it again, says Graham Lawton
WE PICKED the wrong day to take a small boat across a fjord in wild western Iceland. The weather was challenging, to say the least, with a heavy swell and lashing rain. We were trying to get out to a salmon farm to see it for ourselves, but were beaten back.
I was in the country on a press trip organised and funded by the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, which campaigns on numerous environmental issues. In this case, it was highlighting the harms of open-net salmon farms, where fish are confined in circular pens in the sea. Iceland is quite new to this, but it is big business in Norway, Scotland, the Faroe Islands and Canada. I knew there were problems associated with it, but continued to eat its bounty from time to time. Never again.
“It’s a monstrous way to produce food,” says Jón Kaldal at the Icelandic Wildlife Fund. The salmon are confined in nets 35 metres in diameter and up to 18 metres deep. Each holds up to 120,000 fish in densities much greater than in the wild. They are kept there for 16 to 24 months until they are large enough to be slaughtered. Then they are sucked out of the pens in a giant salmon hoover and dispatched with a blow to the head or electrocuted.
Their time in the pens is an ordeal. They chafe against the net and fight with one another, injuring their fins and tails. They are eaten alive by salmon lice, small crustaceans that burrow into their skin. A wild salmon might have one or two lice, but many farmed ones are riddled with them. The lice thrive in an environment packed with salmon that can’t swim into fresh water to force the pests to drop off. “It’s a paradise for lice,” says Simen Sætre, co-author of The New Fish, the product of a five-year investigation into the Norwegian salmon industry.
Some fish are so badly affected by lice that large patches of skin get eaten away entirely, says Elvar Friðriksson at conservation group the North Atlantic Salmon Fund. Around 20 per cent of salmon die from louse injuries or stress, says Kaldal. Outbreaks of a virus called infectious salmon anaemia pose yet another burden. “The welfare issue is absolutely horrendous in this business,” he says.
I saw for myself the damage inflicted by a life in a sea pen, in the shape of a farmed salmon that had escaped along with thousands of others and was recaptured and killed in a river. Its fins were ragged and its tail stunted, while one of its eyes had been eaten away almost to the bone. Even in this lousy and bedraggled state, a fish will end up on the plates of consumers.
There are issues beyond animal welfare. The fish produce tonnes of faeces, which simply fall onto the seabed along with uneaten food pellets, causing dead zones under the pens. The pesticides used to de-louse the fish also kill other crustaceans. The nets are often coated with copper oxide to stop them fouling up with marine organisms, but this leaches into the water. The farms also produce large quantities of microplastic pollution from degradation of the nets and feeding tubes, which are scoured by pellets that are shot into the pens at high speed “like a sandblaster”, says Kaldal.
The fish are fed other fish that are perfectly fit for human consumption, often caught in developing countries, depriving people who need it of high-quality protein and converting it, inefficiently, into a premium product for Western consumers. And of course the fish periodically escape and interbreed with wild salmon, diluting their gene pool.
“This is factory farming,” says Kaldal. “It’s not sustainable.” And yet when I used to buy salmon in my supermarket, it was labelled as “responsibly farmed”.
It is possible to farm salmon without trashing the environment and torturing the fish. Land-based tanks contain the waste and can be kept louse-free. Iceland has a growing number of these. “What you need is land, cheap electricity and water, and that’s pretty much all we have,” says Friðriksson – but the costs are higher and the welfare issues not entirely resolved. Fish farmed this way are on sale in Iceland, but not really in the UK.
To be fair to the open-pen industry, in Iceland at least, it follows rules laid down by the government, which are based on advice from marine scientists. Icelandic salmon farming company Arctic Fish – which had initially agreed to take us out to the pens, but backed out at the last minute – put up a spokesman, Daníel Jakobsson. He accepts there are problems in the industry, but insists the company is complying with its environmental and welfare obligations. The death rate in the pens is actually only 5 per cent, he says.
Nonetheless, I will be voting with my shopping trolley. Sea-farmed salmon is off my list. “The environmental argument should be enough for people not to eat this,” says Friðriksson. “Why would you want to eat this?”
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