Aquaculture Industry 'Failure,' Study Claims

LARRY PYNN / Vancouver Sun 11jun03

Rather than a sustainable replacement for wild salmon stocks, the aquaculture industry is "an ecological and economic failure" that requires more energy than traditional fishing fleets and uses more ocean resources than it produces, a University of B.C. study concludes.

"It's simply not true we do these things to feed the world's starving millions," says ecologist William Rees, a professor at UBC's school of community and regional planning. "We do it because it represents a large infusion of foreign capital into the province and creates jobs in areas that are suffering from bad management of our forests and wild fish stocks."

Rees will deliver the study's findings at the World Summit on Salmon, a sold-out gathering of 160 salmon authorities from around the globe, starting today and continuing through Friday at Simon Fraser University.

Rees said in an interview that 58 per cent of the pellets used to feed salmon reared in net pens comes from rendered fish caught elsewhere in the world, including anchovies, sardines and pilchards, from South American countries such as Peru and Chile.

When you take into consideration this hidden environmental toll on the oceans, he said, the conclusion is that one kilogram of farmed salmon requires the equivalent of four kilograms of wild fish. "There's an 80-per-cent loss of biomass in that transfer," he said.

Reached at her Campbell River office, Nicole Nelson of the B.C. Salmon Farmers' Association said she could not comment on Rees' findings without seeing the study in detail.

However, the association Web site states: "Farmed salmon have higher gross energy and protein retention rates than either chicken, swine or cattle, making salmon farming an extremely efficient form of food production."

While salmon farmers claim their fish are more efficient because, in part, they don't consume energy swimming the ocean for food, Rees said that simply isn't true. "It doesn't compensate for all that energy spent catching [and processing] the damned food in the first place."

His study also shows that for every kilogram of farmed salmon, the industry consumes five litres of diesel fuel, two to three times more than it takes to catch a wild pink or sockeye by a traditional fleet.

"What farming does is to reduce the total amount of food in the world and to add to greenhouse gases," he said.

Developing countries are the real victims of salmon farming because rich nations such as Canada, the U.S., Scotland and Norway bid higher the price of wild fish used for meal. Poorer people cannot afford to eat their fish, while South American fish-packing companies are forced to close because they cannot compete in the global market.

"We're creating employment here, but it's at the expense of unemployment in South America and lower dietary standards among relatively impoverished people," Rees said.

"If we have any sense of global responsibilities, we need to recognize that fish farming has an enormous impact. We're not adding to the world's fisheries, we're detracting from them."

The solution is not to create aquaculture industries, but to do a better job managing our natural resources. "Having to farm fish is an admission of failure, to husband the wild fish stocks," he said.

Rees noted that traditional fishing also has its drawbacks, since it consumes fuel in catching fish that would eventually have returned to their spawning grounds. "It's a dumb idea," he said. "The fish come home to the open mouth of the river. We could catch them all at almost no energy expense."

In his presentation, Rees credits the research of former UBC PhD student Peter Tyedmers, now a professor in the school for resource and environmental studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax.