Hook, line and sinker

Don Whiteley | Image: Jupiter | Published: February 01, 2008

Established in 1990, Tofino-based Creative Salmon Co. Ltd. is a small operation that produces 1,500 tonnes of salmon annually. It has fish-farm operations in the waters of Clayoquot Sound and in the traditional territory of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations. From its inception, this company has followed a path toward what it hoped would be certification as an organic operation.

Creative produces only Chinook salmon (most big operations farm Atlantic salmon), uses no antibiotics and feeds its fish fishmeal made with organically produced grains. A founding member of the Pacific Organic Seafoods Association, Creative participated in the development of a set of organic standards for the industry more than three years ago. Creative’s ultimate goal is status as a certified organic producer.

According to GM Spencer Evans, that goal is toast.

Over the years, environmental activists have taken up a crusade against fish farming that, says Evans, has succeeded in setting the standards for organic certification so high that it will be unattainable for those rearing fish in open nets.

And their lobby has become so powerful that the B.C. Legislature’s Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture put out a final report in May 2007 recommending that the fish-farming industry move to closed containment systems over a five-year period. Should that happen, say industry insiders, B.C.’s booming fish-farming sector could be left high and dry.

Within a decade, B.C.’s fish-farming industry has grown from a smattering of relatively small mom-and-pop fish farms, mostly on Vancouver Island, to the province’s biggest agricultural commodity producer.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP economic survey released last year showed 2006 revenues hit $450 million (21 per cent higher than the previous year) and production increased 16 per cent to 82,000 tonnes of fish. Direct and indirect employment, calculated using the same parameters that apply to other agriculture and food processing operations, was more than 6,000. Aquaculture is an
export-oriented industry, with more than 80 per cent of the province’s production going to a U.S. market that is growing by 15 per cent a year, and with farmed salmon the fastest-growing seafood product in the country.

The growth potential for this nascent sector is enormous, according to industry experts. B.C. offers an uncluttered coastline stretching from Vancouver to Prince Rupert and optimum rearing conditions (five native species of salmon thrive in B.C. waters) – not to mention proximity to the huge U.S. market.

But highly public demonstrations of protest stand in the way of that growth. Segue

to the waters under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, where on November 6 last year the B.C.-based Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform (CAAR) floated a huge banner urging grocery giant Safeway to stop selling farmed fish.

Move across to the U.S. east coast and into the pages of the New York Times, where in June 2007 CAAR placed a large advertisement stating the same message. Head back to Canada, where in Winnipeg, Vancouver and Victoria, mock funeral processions were staged at Safeway stores lamenting the death of wild salmon – at the hands of the fish farmers, of course.

CAAR – a coalition of nine environmental groups including the David Suzuki Foundation and the Friends of Clayoquot Sound – regularly excoriates current fish-farming practices, blaming them for
spreading sea-lice infestations, killing marine mammals and polluting the marine environment with fish waste.

Visit farmedanddangerous.com and you’ll get the idea loud and clear: CAAR doesn’t like fish farming, at least not the way it is practiced in B.C. Topping the list of reforms advocated by CAAR is a total ban on open-pen net cages for rearing salmon – the system now in use throughout B.C. and in other countries with fish-farming industries – and a switch to what are called closed containment systems.

The idea got some significant traction with the release last May of the final report from the B.C. Legislature’s Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture, which recom­mended moving to closed containment systems over a five-year period.

Say goodbye to the B.C. fish-farming industry if that recommendation is adopted, say the fish farmers. It would impose costs so high that, in the absence of mirror-image regulations in all other fish-farming jurisdictions, it would render the entire local industry uncompetitive.

That hasn’t stopped the federal and provincial governments from funding a $10-million floating closed-containment pilot project in Campbell River, developed by the Middle Bay Sustainable Aquaculture Institute. It is expected to be completed in 2008, but industry representatives are skeptical about its economic viability as previous efforts to develop land-based systems proved too costly.

“We are very comfortable with the methods we use right now,” says Odd Grydeland, acting executive director of the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association. “But if the provincial government were to adopt the whole recommendation from the committee, I think most of the current operators would start to divest themselves of activities in B.C. and look somewhere else.”

The uncertainty over what the government will do is already apparent, largely because of its reluctance to move forward with new sites while the controversy continues to rage. B.C. Salmon Farmers Association executive director Mary Ellen Walling (currently on leave) had this to say in a recent newsletter: “British Columbia has turned away over $40 million in capital investment in the last three years because of lengthy site approval delays. The lost sales from these farms are estimated at over $450 million – money that would have been reinvested back into coastal communities.”

The main issue for CAAR and others concerned about fish farming is the risk of aggravating sea-lice infestations in the wild fish that swim past fish farms on their way to and from the open ocean. The issue boiled over about five years ago in the Broughton Archipelago near Telegraph Cove on Vancouver Island, where environmentalists have long believed that there is a connection between the fish farms and lice infestations. Researcher and activist Alexandra Morton (who in 2006 was given the Vancouver Aquarium’s Murray Newman Award for Excellence in Aquatic Conservation) began collecting evidence of sea-lice problems on wild fish, and attracted significant media attention to her efforts.

The science, so far, has not produced a smoking gun. Although environmentalists argue that the case has, in fact, been proven, industry and government scientists do not believe it has. The differing outlooks have led to a “duelling scientists” climate that is still not completely resolved (see “The Strife Aquatic,” facing page). Numerous ongoing research projects, run under the auspices of the Pacific Salmon Forum, are now trying to provide a clear picture of the relationship – or the lack thereof – between lice on farmed fish and lice on wild salmon. A new stack of reports will come out in the next few months, but don’t bet on any particular conclusions at this point.

Despite the lack of scientific clarity, the Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture’s recommendation for closed containment systems (and there’s no consensus on whether they will solve the problem either) was based on something known as “the precautionary principle.” The committee’s 2007 report states, “The precautionary principle recognizes that the absence of full scientific cer­tainty should not be used to delay actions or decisions when faced with threats of serious or irreversible harm.” Clare Backman, director of community relations and environmental compliance for Marine Harvest Canada, the province’s biggest fish-farm operator, is not keen on that concept.

“None of the currently available technologies are set up to address sea lice,” he says. “Therefore, the same controls now used in conventional nets would also be applied in closed containment – so there’s really no advantage there. We have to turn the focus away from the magic fix of some kind of technology and look at the impacts, and choose the right technologies for the impacts.”

Fish-farm operators are required by law to monitor their fish for the presence of sea lice and to have an approved plan in place for dealing with them. The industry uses a variety of techniques, from fallowing farms to treating fish with SLICE, a chemical that prevents lice outbreaks.

Backman says that this unresolved issue and others, such as a recommendation that no fish farms be sited on the province’s north coast, are hindering the industry’s ability to look ahead with any degree of certainty. And he notes that other jurisdictions – Norway and Scotland, for instance – are doing a lot of research into the sea-lice issue without moving toward closed containment.

“There have been a lot of reviews and a lot of response by industry to those regulations and reviews,” he says. “B.C. is now known to be a high-cost place of doing business. We want to see more creative solutions that don’t add a lot more costs but do add confidence that we can do this in a way that is sustainable.”

In the middle of this chasm is Pat Bell, B.C.’s minister of agriculture and lands. Bell is trying to come up with a new aquaculture policy that will address the gulf between the industry and environmentalists and give the industry the certainty it needs to make investment decisions for future expansion.