Wild salmon stocks are suffering terribly

There was a time when we were all encouraged to look to Norway as the model for an independent nation. Same sort of population, sensible trading relations with the EU, control of their own fisheries, huge sovereign oil fund and all sorts of other desirable life-enhancing features, apart from hideous drink prices.

Anyway, all that’s rather on the back of the wood burner as independence fades from the political landscape. Still, there are things to be learned from the Norwegians.

Take fish farming. Norway has been well ahead of the game for 50 years, which is why we should pay attention. Or at least the Scottish government should. Finally convinced that sea lice from salmon cages are partially responsible for the decline in Norway’s once prolific wild salmon stocks, the Norwegian government has decreed that henceforth new salmon farms will have to have “self-containment”. That is, either the whole process must take place on land in sealed lice-free tanks or if at sea, then in huge floating containers – converted cargo ships are being tested – from which neither lice, waste food, chemicals nor salmon sewage may escape. So will Scotland follow suit?

The sea lice problem on the west coast is atrocious and the caged salmon fatalities have been mounting. Chemicals simply aren’t working effectively. Much store has been laid at the doors of heat treatment, flushing fish through a “Thermolicer”, while various species of “cleaner” fish, such as wrasse, are hailed as the “natural” answer, but scientists now warn we may be catching too many and upsetting local eco systems. Wrasse farming may be one answer. But this, as the industry admits, is all long term. Yet the Scottish government and its supine environmental handmaiden SEPA simply hold their breath and hope science, or something, will come to the rescue in the face of rising fatalities. And in the meantime stocks of wild salmon and sea trout on the west continue to be hammered by the fast evolving lice escaping from salmon cages.

There are, it is true, local anomalies, as there always will be. But if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck the chances are it’s a duck. Or lice, as everyone but the Scottish industry recognises. The truth is that in spite of its green PR sheen the Scottish salmon farming industry is too big for the government to upset by insisting it embraces expensive but sustainable self-containment systems.

The only hope now for wild fish appears to be market forces. Once caged salmon losses become financially unsustainable the industry will only then change production methods to survive and in doing so save the wild west coast salmon. n