Mar� n Jaff a

BY DR MARTIN JAFFA

A blinkered view

The SNP-Green policy platform does not give much detail, and it displays little understanding of the facts around salmon farming

There has been much debate as to the sense in the SNP allowing the Green Party to join them in a coalition. Arguably the SNP have weakened their position by providing the seven Green MSPs with much greater power than the public intended.

The result of the parties’ agreement is published in a shared draft policy document, Working Together to Build a Greener, Fairer, Independent Scotland, which runs to 51 pages. Their shared policy on aquaculture appears on page 46 and covers less than a page.

Yet although aquaculture receives little coverage, the salmon farming industry should be concerned about this new coalition. This is because the Green Party policy on aquaculture seems to have developed from contact between their environmental spokesman and an anti-salmon farming activist. Apart from this one source, the Green Party has shown little interest in hearing any other view and certainly not that of the industry itself.

The Green Party position on salmon farming is that they want to see a transition to closed containment production, despite little understanding of what this means. Back in July, the Scottish Daily Mail reported that Green Party co-leader Lorna Slater wanted to see all salmon farms shut down but, in the interview, she was forced to admit that she didn’t know where Scotland’s salmon farms were located.

The draft shared strategy includes four recommendations, the first of which – an independent view of the current regulatory regime for fish farming – has already been announced.

The second recommendation is for a vision and strategy for sustainable aquaculture. This already exists. Salmon farming is inherently sustainable and there is already a government plan to expand the industry by 2030. Environmental protection and community benefits, mentioned in the document, are also already part of the existing strategy.

For many years, the industry’s critics have claimed that salmon farming has damaged the environment, yet when they are asked to provide an example, there is a deathly silence. At most, they point the finger at the seabed under the net pens, an area totalling the size of a couple of 18-hole golf courses for all the salmon farms in Scotland, yet it is already well established that this waste is reabsorbed back into the environment and, as no salmon farm site is a permanent structure, the farms can be moved, increasing the speed of seabed recovery.

I have been around long enough to see how salmon farms have boosted the life of dying communities that lost young people to the big cities to find work. Some salmon companies have now resorted to building homes for their staff, who are priced out of the local housing market by the same incomers who criticise salmon farm development.

The third recommendation is a programme of work to better protect wildlife and the environment. I repeat the question: where is the evidence that salmon farming is damaging wildlife and the environment?

The greatest number of complaints about the impact of salmon farming come from the anglers who blame salmon farming for the decline of wild salmon and sea trout. They can provide only the most circumstantial evidence to support their claims, but by contrast since the first farmed salmon smolts were put to sea in 1967 anglers have caught and killed 244,551 salmon and 357,170 sea trout in the area for their sport.

The third recommendation also mentions the Salmon Interactions Working Group (SIWG). The makeup of the group ensured that those supporting wild fish were always in the majority. Thus, the group decided that salmon farms did have an impact on wild fish and therefore the discussion focused on what should be done to protect wild fish – but only from salmon farms, not from anglers or any other of the pressures faced by wild salmon populations.

This recommendation also refers to the spatially adaptive sea lice risk assessment framework, even though one of the partner organisations – the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) – told the Scottish Parliament’s Rural Economy and Connectivity committee that sea lice from salmon farms were not responsible for the decline of wild fish stocks.

Wrasse and escapes are also on the agenda. Until salmon farms showed an interest in wrasse, their use and welfare were of little concern. They were fished to provide bait in lobster and crab pots. They were perceived as having no value, until salmon farms were interested in them.

“They can provide only the most circumstantial evidence to support their claims”

This too applies to escapes. No farmer wants to lose any fish, but the impact of escaped fish on wild stocks is negligible. In 2012, the wild fish sector spent £1m of government money on investigating the genetic differences of salmon within the same rivers and between fish from different rivers in the Focusing Atlantic Salmon Management on Populations (FASMOP) project. The study failed to identify any differences, but anglers persist in claiming that the genetics of wild salmon will be irrevocably damaged by interbreeding with salmon of farmed origin.

Wild salmon suffer much more damage from dams, agricultural pollution, predation and exploitation, not forgetting climate change. What is being done to address these issues?

The fourth and final recommendation is to commit to supporting local communities (something in which the salmon farming industry already has a good track record) and recreational fisheries. The latter is simply nonsense. Some parts of the industry have in the past tried to help with enhancement of stocks for recreational fishing and in return have received nothing but criticism.

The problem is that the wild fish sector can’t make up their minds whether they want to protect wild salmon or wild salmon fisheries. If it is the first, then stop killing the fish for sport. If it is the second, then the industry is more than willing to help with restocking, something that Marine Scotland Science is steadfastly against.

Removing salmon farms will not bring back wild salmon and sea trout. It is only necessary to look to the east coast fisheries to see that they are suffering too, yet they are hundreds of miles from any salmon farm.

Finally, this recommendation aims to promote innovation and to support services such as fish health and welfare inspections and monitoring, all things that already take place on a regular basis.

The real problem, in my view, is that the Green Party live in a blinkered world in which their preconceived ideas lack any relationship to the world in which we live. By coincidence, a story has appeared on the national news about the current state of pavements in Brighton and Hove that are being overrun by weeds after the Green Party run council banned the use of herbicides. Local residents say that the pavements are being destroyed by overgrown weeds and plants that are a hazard to the local community. The Sunday Times reports that two elderly ladies have ended up in hospital after falling on a damaged pavement. Is this a foretaste of what will happen when the Scottish Green Party start to exert their influence on Scotland’s daily life? FF Above: Are anglers defending wild salmon or threatening their survival?

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