This week the Ferret has published figures which should shock everyone, about the massive increase in fish farm pollutants and the use of pesticides and antibiotics in recent years. The figures would be incredible, but result from reporting by the aquaculture companies themselves and are taken from Scottish Government and SEPA databases.
“The latest official pollution inventory reveals that discharges of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and zinc from salmon cages rose by more than 4,000 tonnes between 2019 and 2020. Overall emissions of pesticides used to kill sea lice also increased by 45 kilograms.”
In response to my tweet about this an industry apologist posted a graph showing the use of chemicals in land agriculture, for “context” in what he no doubt assumed was a gotcha, but he has only underlined once again the total difference between landbased and seabased activities. Of course, it’s by no means a given that practices in agriculture are 100% environmentally friendly. I’ll leave the argument about that to others.
I’ll also leave it for another day to discuss the fact that if farmers routinely saw up to 82% of their stock of mature cows dying off due to disease, the resultant piles of rotting corpses at the sides of fields would surely provoke public outcry. With aquaculture the facts only come to light occasionally, for example late last year when several hundred tonnes of dead salmon were taken off Gigha for ensiling, resulting in the ferry terminal being seriously affected by stink and mess, an event that would have gone unnoticed in official circles had not the dedicated Corin Smith been on hand with his drone.
My main issue with the land/sea comparison is simply that farms are invariably owned by someone, whereas the seabed is owned, in terms of title, by the Crown, but held in trust for all of us, the public. The difference is more that purely conceptual; in the case of a conventional farm there is always an owner, be it the farmer or a landlord, with a vested interest to ensure that an asset that may have belonged to, or held under a secure tenancy for generations, will remain productive and/or marketable for those to come along in future. Those who are currently exploiting our public seabed have no such interest whatsoever. Let’s look briefly at a couple of them.
The largest operator in Scotland is MOWI, until recently named Marine Harvest until it was renamed following adverse publicity. The name reflects the name of the original founder, Mr Mowinkel, although one hears that he may not have been completely delighted. The main owner is understood to be Mr Jon Fredriksen, about whom I’ll say no more (google him!).
Then, the owner until recently of “Scottish” Salmon Company Limited was Yuri Lopatinsky, about whom more has recently been in the Press.
Bluntly, can anyone imagine the private owner of a farm in Scotland giving a foreign oligarch the freedom to cover the fields with rotting faeces and unwanted feeding stuffs, rendering what was once fertile soil utterly anoxic and useless for cultivation for several lifetimes? That’s exactly what the Scottish Government, on our behalf, allows fish farm companies to do to the seabed.
Next up, the pesticides. Research commissioned by SEPA several years ago confirmed that one component, Emamectin Benzoate, which kills all crustaceans, was still active on the seabed four and a half years after a fish farm had ceased operations on the site in question. That’s become a benchmark; perhaps they’ll send the biologists back to do some more tests after what would now be ten years. This is important, because sealice, lobsters and crabs are all crustaceans, so what price traditional creeling?
Due to very a very lax (non) inspection system plus no checks whatever during lockdown and regulations actually relaxed due to it, the farms have been doing what they want.
Yes, 45 Kilos of deadly poison is an awful lot to dump on someone else’s property!
@FerretScot @HI_Voices
