Some hard truths from Michael Wigan on the fish farming industry

The Scottish Government may be reluctant to tell the dreadful truth about the environmental impact of fish farms, but Michael Wigan has no such reservations

The Scottish government’s response to its rural economy committee’s condemnatory report on salmon farming has been pronounced. Minister Fergus Ewing, as he had to, said that the industry would be better regulated. In the same breath came the mantra about its important contribution to jobs and Scotland’s rural economy. We are never allowed to forget that the value of exported salmon is £600 million.

Ewing is in a predicament. In a landscape largely devoid of credible business accomplishments Scottish salmon farming is a rare stand-out success story, superficially. However, reiterating the size of farmed salmon’s export value is meaningless given that this sum is taxed in Norway. It is a foreign industry outsourcing for a pittance the right to wreck a faraway pristine location. Scotland’s financial receipts from salmon farming are a few employment taxes, licenses, and little else.

The important receipt is that which does not dare breathe its name – pollution. Salmon farming profits are big because it pays no service charges. It pollutes the coastline with impunity, self-regulates the selfdetermined rules, fouls the seabed, discharges tons of chemicals into the marine environment, eradicates wild salmon and shellfish, and operates within a legislative near-vacuum, in glaring contrast to all other food production. The government’s Christmas gift to the un-needy was a research grant to develop open-sea alternatives to its lethal estuary-based operations.

The employment claim is a chimera. Reports are accumulating, most recently from Wester Ross, showing that the closures of other marine-based industries on account of its dreaded neighbour outweigh jobs on the cages. Scallop diving, creel fishing, underwater tourism and others fold as the net-pens radiate filth. Salmon farming often snuffs out local livelihoods, not the reverse.

Ewing is a minister in a government which must burnish its few credentials. Going to the polls boasting about wind energy is not enough. Issuing marine occupation licenses to multinationals is not seen as particularly inspired. Salmon farming produces food, equals good. There is precious little else to boast about.

Then, Ewing is succoured by the international scene. Using its infallible model of being in charge of its own environmental footprint salmon farming bends governments all over. Although its witches brew of disease has now spread into Canada’s Pacific chinook salmon population, in places where traditional coastal industries outweigh salmon farming vastly, the Canadian government won’t say boo to the goose. The latest province to succumb is Newfoundland, hitherto resplendent with achingly-wonderful salmon rivers. Iceland is starting to capitulate. As for Norway, in the estuary of that wild Atlantic giant salmon mecca, the Alta, there is a logjam of salmon farms. Wild runs are fading.

One day the remorseless expansion of this industry will be seen like the rubber boom, or palm oil entrepreneurs clearing the Amazon rainforest, or early gold-mining. It leaves devastation. Scotland’s government will be as culpable as those expansionist administrations from yesteryear. The likelihood of meaningful regulation is faint, indeed the official target remains for huge expansion. We will see.

Meantime the rich heritage of glaciation continues to amaze. In a five-mile Highland loch called Laidon scientists have found no less than four types of brown trout. The types look completely unalike. It is like seeing four types of blackbirds in the garden.

Scotland’s ice age heritage has bequeathed a fascinating underwater universe. Ice was once a mile thick and as it melted fish populations became marooned and then adapted. Sea-migrating salmon laden with eggs nosed inquisitively onto the delicious fresh gravels. Their progeny sought and secured primitive life-forms to fatten on.

The next cataclysmic event was salmon farming. People forget that it is in lochs, and not only sea-cages, that the pollution starts.

Here hatchery salmon are reared to smolt size. Scottish lochs hold, or fail to hold, around 45 million cultured smolts. When they escape they displace wild fish. The purity of freshwater lochs should be protected too. Hold your breath.

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It is a foreign industry outsourcing for a pittance the right to wreck a faraway pristine location