Town & Country
THE names of the salmon farms worst hit by the ‘sea-lice crisis’ have been released to Salmon & Trout Conservation Scotland (S&TC Scotland) after it emerged, earlier this year, that the weight of Scottish salmon farmed in the last three months of 2016 dropped significantly. The identities of the farms were initially withheld by Scottish ministers.
Farms that supply a number of UK supermarkets, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Co-op, are among those that have breached the trigger levels for numbers of adult female sea lice on farmed salmon, in some cases with up to 20 times the acceptable amount.
‘The data that Scottish Government didn’t want anyone to see shows that salmon farms have been permitted to operate with breathtakingly high lice numbers for weeks or months on end,’ says Guy Linley-adams, solicitor to S&TC Scotland. ‘To date, no meaningful enforcement action, such as the ordering of culls or immediate reductions in fish-farm biomass, has been taken against serial offenders.’
Scotland has more sea lice than anywhere else, according to figures from Marine Harvest, the largest producer of Scottish salmon, which is losing about 1,500 tons of fish per year (out of nearly 40,000 tons produced). These small marine parasites that feed on the skin and blood of salmon, weakening the growth and health of the fish, have boomed during this decade due to intense fish farming and rising sea temperatures.
Infected fish don’t actually pose a threat to consumers, as they are discarded or treated, but the data is disturbing nonetheless, not least because of the increased price of fish, which has soared to record levels in recent months. The industry now spends at least £30 million a year combating lice (which are increasingly resistant to the chemicals used); profits and production were down by an estimated 7% last year.
Andrew Graham-stewart, Director of S&TC Scotland, comments: ‘Many of the individual farms’ sea-lice numbers, which have long been hidden within regional aggregated averages published by the industry, are far worse than we envisaged. Sealice numbers on farmed fish across much of the industry are of epidemic proportions. More worrying, the Scottish Government’s flagship new policy [of June 2016] appears to be a sham, little more than a cynical widening of the goalposts to the industry’s advantage, a policy with no teeth.’
The worst-performing company in Scotland (based on an examination of the period November 2017 to August this year) is Grieg Seafood Shetland Ltd and the worst in the West Highlands is The Scottish Salmon Company, which has a concentration of farms in Loch Fyne. ‘The true extent of the failure of salmon farms to control sea lice is astonishing,’ says Mr Linley-adams. ‘Claims that the situation is under control are risible and we will now write to the supermarkets asking them to stop selling salmon from the worst-performing farms.’
He continues: ‘Scottish ministers need to rethink radically their approach and to end their unconditional support for the industry in the face of this and other equally shocking environmental data now being revealed about its performance. We also call upon the industry itself to end both its tobacco-industry style denials about the damage it causes and the “tit-for-tat” accusations it repeatedly makes, in favour of embracing the positive change that must now come.’