Re: “Science continues to show B.C. salmon farms are safe,” comment, Nov. 21.
Oceana is an international think-tank dedicated to promoting the revitalization and sustainability of wild fisheries with a goal of increasing the global productivity of this resources to help feed a growing world population.
Oceana lobbies governments, including Canada, to develop sustainable wild-fisheries policies through the use of good science, ecosystem-based management and a framework that includes three basic principles: Set sustainable and accountable rates of harvest through the use of quota systems, reduce bycatch and protect fish habitat.
Oceana recognizes that salmon aquaculture is not a panacea for feeding the world’s hungry or conserving wild fisheries, but rather an unsustainable drain on vital ocean resources with a long list of cultural and environmental consequences.
The global salmon-aquaculture industry relies on global reduction fisheries to produce the fish meal and fish oil necessary to feed their salmon. It takes up to six kilograms of forage fish to produce one kilogram of farmed salmon. These industrial fisheries target the ocean’s small pelagic fishes, such as anchovy, herring, sardines and mackerel, depleting the ocean’s biomass of forage fish.
The Peruvian anchovy fishery supplies almost 40 per cent of the global supply of fish meal among regulatory and social conditions that could only be described as Third World. (See YouTube: “Greed of Feed” or “Peru’s Vanishing Fish.”)
Salmon farming is a force against nature and a destructive use of the ocean’s resources that does not belong on a coast with five species of wild Pacific salmon that need our full attention.
Allan Crow
East Sooke
