Fish farming and its environmental myth

In September last year, Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash announced a government aquaculture strategy at a Blenheim-held aquaculture conference. The industry currently had annual sales of about $600 million and Nash said the goal to reach $3 billion in sales was ‘‘ambitious but achievable’’.

The Government planned to build on the existing $600m industry by maximising the value of existing farms through innovation and extending into modern land-based farms and open-ocean aquaculture, he said.

I was reminded of this in a local supermarket when I glanced at fish prices. Snapper was selling at $48 per kilogram.

The New Zealand sea fishery is under threat from over-fishing and has been for many decades. The warnings have been there for many years. Recreational fishers often witness firsthand the declines.

New Zealand’s fish stocks are ‘‘managed’’ under the Quota Management System (QMS) but it is a system which allows fishing rights to fish species to be traded, sold and bought.

Inevitably the corporate companies swallow up the smaller New Zealand commercial fishermen’s quota shares. Today, corporate companies monopolise the fishery. As a former commercial fisherman, I know the situation only too well.

At the 2017 election, Labour promised to independently investigate the QMS. Yet in early 2019, Nash announced he had abandoned Labour’s election pledge to review the QMS. It was of deep concern that the minister dishonoured this pledge by a simple comment in a newspaper.

At the time, the Marlborough Recreational Fishers Association wrote to the Government deploring the broken promise. With ailing fish stocks, it would be logical to review the system.

Instead the minister – and the Government – sees fish farming as the saviour.

Salmon farming has been lauded by King Salmon as of immense potential. The Government agrees and even the Marlborough District Council seems to bend over backwards to encourage and protect the salmon farms from criticism and scrutiny.

Recently a member of MRFA asked for details of dead, often diseased, salmon dumped at the Blenheim landfill. The request was refused because of ‘‘commercial sensitivity’’. The matter is now before the Ombudsman.

So if information is not forthcoming, then one is forced to turn to overseas experience of fish farming. Late last year the British edition of Country Living magazine, November 2019, carried an article on salmon farming in Scotland.

The situation is so dire that the Scottish Advertising Standards Agency recently ruled a salmon farm company cannot use the word ‘‘sustainable’’ to describe its product or operations.

Photographer-conservationist Colin Smith said salmon farming had created a huge ecological imbalance, with an estimated wild population of Atlantic salmon on the northwest coast of Scotland at about 20,000 in contrast to salmon farms in the same area carrying 50-70 million. An ecological disaster had been created with the main source of the problem being the use of ‘‘open cages’’.

‘‘Fish are kept in nets suspended below a platform in the sea. Feed goes in and everything else – from spent feed to faeces, disease, parasites, chemicals and antibiotics – flows back into the open water. This impacts indigenous species such as crab, shrimp, prawn and lobster. As a result

these farms diminish biodiversity, sucking the life out of ecosystems surrounding them.’’

Similar circumstances are occurring in the Marlborough Sounds. Change the types of species affected to New Zealand species and we have the exact same results.

In one example, the once mighty Waihinau Bay in Bulwer and Beatrix Bay – both outer Pelorus sounds – were treasure chests of kai. An old saying by local kaitianga principles was ‘‘when the tide goes out the table is laid’’, meaning the bay had plentiful stocks of shellfish, paua, crayfish and of course the fish species. Both bays are now near devoid of life, including even the seaweed which is now near non-existent.

‘‘Parasites spread quickly through these inhumane environments, blocking gills and eating skin (of farmed fish), before moving out to prey on wild fish. Then there is fish farm slurry which nitrifies the water, increasing algae blooms, removing oxygen and reducing quality.’’

Scottish salmon farms emitted about

400,000 tonnes of waste in 2017 – equal to the sewage equivalent of 2.5 million people going into the ocean. It took 25 kilograms of wild fish, removed from places such as Peru, the Gambia and Angola, to feed 5kg of farmed fish in Scotland.

However, the Scottish salmon farm industry was experiencing about 20 per cent mortality, meaning that for every five fish produced one was dying.

Last year the Scottish salmon farm industry created about 16,000 tonnes of dead fish.

‘‘When you consider that to produce the 16,000 tonnes of dead fish, it took five times of 16,000 (80,000 tonnes) of feed, it is like taking 80,000 tonnes of fish out of the ocean just to burn them in incinerators,’’ wrote Colin Smith.

I return to the supermarket price of $48 per kg for snapper – a species only sometimes available.

Minister Nash and the Government have a moral obligation to provide fish at an affordable price to New Zealand shoppers. Deviating off on fish farm fantasies away from efficiently managing the natural fishery seems blatant deception.

Here in my backyard, the Marlborough Sounds, fishing restrictions have been placed on commercial operations since 1983. Trawling was banned and a very limited amount of gill netting was allowed but has since all but near been abandoned. Yet the fish, the shellfish, the seaweed, and in fact entire ecosystems have gone and not returned. What have been the only other factors influencing the sounds from man? Fish farming, aquaculture and forestry runoff. One or all should be ashamed of this ecological destruction of what should be a national treasure.