Horgan must decide on future of salmon farms
B.C. risks falling behind as competitors move toward land-based farming, write Tony Allard and Ross Beaty.
B.C. has an opportunity to resolve persisting concerns about salmon farming while safely expanding the industry, creating more jobs and revitalizing the wild-salmon economy. Premier John Horgan must decide on June 20 whether to set a course to seize this opportunity, or consign B.C.’s salmon-farming industry to a slow but certain death.
On June 20, provincial tenures for 20 opennet-pen salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago expire. The Broughton has been a hotbed of controversy: a place where First Nations have ordered the eviction of farms and where much of the independent science proving the impacts of salmon farming on wild fish has taken place. It is also home to the landbased salmon farm Kuterra, a pilot project that proved to the world that salmon can be raised to market size in land-based systems that do not impact the environment. It is entirely appropriate that it should be here that the industry’s course correction begins.
The future growth of this industry will be on land and it appears that, worldwide, the smart money knows this. Currently, 250,000 tonnes of land-based production are planned, and this number has doubled over the past year. One land-based farm under construction in Florida will produce more than B.C.’s total current output.
Driven by rising feed prices and the cost of controlling sea lice and disease, the same multinationals that are farming in B.C. waters with net-pens are elsewhere exploring contained systems. In Norway and Europe, support for containment solutions is high, with research funding, government loan guarantees and incentive pricing for “green” salmon farms combining to help fuel a transition to land.
Today in B.C., our wild salmon and ecosystems absorb the cost of industry’s failure to control parasitic lice and disease. Repeated infestations of lice have been shown to reduce productivity of both wild pink and coho salmon populations in the Broughton Archipelago and sadly, the same may be happening now in Clayoquot Sound. The latest scientific papers show that viruses originating on the farms can cause disease in wild Pacific species. And when farmed salmon escape, parasites and diseases are carried into the natal streams of wild salmon.
Last month, Washington state elected to phase out open-net pens, prompted by the threat posed by escaped salmon. This leaves B.C. as the only place in the world trying to manage commercially viable Pacific salmon fisheries and an open-net-pen industry of Atlantic salmon, in the same water. Everywhere that the net-pen industry exists, it leaves a legacy of plummeting stocks of wild salmonids. As we enter yet another season of wild salmon scarcity, with even some of our mighty Fraser River stocks on the endangered list, how can we fail to take action?
On June 20, Horgan can refuse to renew the expiring farm tenures and instead offer the industry incentives to establish land-based farms before it’s too late. Hopefully our federal government, which regulates operating licences, will soon articulate its plan for a transition. A land-based B.C. industry has the advantage of skilled human resources, developed Pacific Rim markets and infrastructure built over the past 30 years. There are willing hosts in North Island communities where jobs are needed and new investment prized. B.C.’s nascent industry will lose much of that advantage once markets begin to be served by land-based projects in the U.S., Japan and China.
Wild salmon are resilient and will thrive again if we first remove the obvious threats from salmon farms and then manage them intelligently. It is within our grasp to conserve and restore wild salmon ecosystems and thereby preserve the culture and economy based on the keystone species that defines this place.
The future growth of this industry will be on land.