Salmon farming objector targets Kintyre aquaculture
An international salmon farming objector at the forefront of global protests has turned his attention to Carradale. Award winning environmental author and scourge of the aquaculture industry, Don Staniford, 47, from Heswall, Merseyside posted a nine-minute video online with Vimeo, on Monday. The film records Mr Staniford reporting for Scottish Salmon Watch. He searches for deceased salmon at Marine Harvest’s Carradale harbour pound. During the film a Marine Harvest employee challenges Mr Staniford and tells him he has no right to be in the pound which is private property. Mr Staniford asks the employee about a claimed 19 per cent salmon mortality incident earlier this year. The employee replied: ‘I don’t know where you get those figures from.’ He adds: ‘You have been trespassing.’ Marine Harvest Scotland managing director, Ben Hadfield, said: ‘We don’t recognise Don Staniford as a credible commentator about our business.’ Mr Staniford runs an organisation named The Global Alliance Against Industrial Aquaculture and has campaigned against salmon farming for more than 20 years. In 2002 he won the Andrew Lees Memorial Award at the British Environment and Media Awards sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund. The judges commended Mr Staniford, ‘as a pre-eminent campaigner on the ecological, economic, consumer and safety issues associated with the fish farming industry, particularly in Scotland’. ‘He was a significant influence in persuading the Scottish Parliament to hold a formal inquiry into fish farming, has written a widely praised Friends of the Earth critique of fish farming in Scotland and uncovered proof that fish farm workers were being ordered to use illegal chemicals.’ The Andrew Lees Memorial Award was set up by a group of environment correspondents in the 1990s to honour the memory of a committed environmental campaigner. In 2005 Mr Staniford was one of a number of authors of a book titled: ‘A Stain Upon the Seas: West Coast Salmon Farming,’ about aquaculture in British Columbia. It won the Roderick Haig-Brown BC Book Prize.