VANCOUVER — A group of more than 50 B.C. chefs is asking the provincial government to stop salmon farming leases in a bid to protect wild salmon.
The chefs, along with environmental crusader David Suzuki, held a news conference in Vancouver Thursday to urge B.C. to terminate 20 open net-pen salmon farm tenures coming up for renewal in June in the Broughton Archipelago, a wild salmon migratory route.
The group has written a letter outlining its concerns to B.C. Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development Doug Donaldson and Minister of Agriculture Lana Popham, according to a release from the David Suzuki Foundation.
David Hawksworth, the chef at Hawksworth Restaurant, said in a statement that it is vital to develop and maintain sustainable food sources.
“It’s clear that these salmon farms are bad for the fish and the environment and, as a result, our industry,” he said.
Some of the other well-known chefs included in the group are Robert Clark from The Fish Counter, Hidekazu Tojo from Tojo’s, Jeremy Belcourt of Salmon n’ Bannock, and Meeru Dhalwala from Vij’s and Rangoli.
The chefs and environmentalists claim that many of B.C.’s fish farms are opposed by the Indigenous people who live on the land, and that farming salmon presents a threat wild salmon because many are infected with a disease that affects both farmed fish and nearby wild salmon.
Suzuki says science has shown that open net-pens present a risk to wild salmon from parasites and disease that cannot be fully mitigated, including piscine reovirus and sea lice, which he says have “serious effects” on the survival of young wild salmon.
“These farms are making both farmed and wild salmon sick. They need to be shut down or transitioned to sustainable closed systems as quickly as possible,” he said, in a statement.
Suzuki says with Washington State’s decision to phase out open net-pen Atlantic salmon aquaculture farms last month, B.C. is now the only jurisdiction on the west coast of North America to allow them.
The B.C. Minister of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations has been contacted, and a spokesperson is looking into whether the minister has received the letter.
