Views: 15
More than two decades ago, the salmon farming industry launched a global campaign to try to discredit a groundbreaking, peer-reviewed scientific study that found farmed salmon contained higher levels of PCBs, a suspected carcinogen, and other contaminants than their wild counterparts. The primary line of attack was using industry-aligned scientists and people on industry payrolls to criticize the findings as scaremongering. None of the objections were credible, as subsequent independent evaluations confirmed.
Today, the industry is waging a similar campaign to disparage and distract from the very real concerns about salmon farms expressed by Off The Table Canada and similar organizations. Like the 2004 attacks, the industry is relying paid spokespeople and researchers aligned with the industry to divert attention from the serious problems associated with the floating feedlots that pollute the waters and endanger marine life along both of Canada’s coasts. Two recent examples show that the CBC has fallen victim to the campaign of misinformation and omission.
On April 19, CBC TV broadcast a show that provided an unchallenged forum for the executive director of the Atlantic Canada Fish Farmers Association to attack Off the Table. His primary line of attack was the group receives “foreign funding.” The show displayed pages from our website, www.offthetable.ca. This kind of smear aims to tar us as outsiders and confuse the public.
Off The Table Canada is 100 percent Canadian and receives no foreign funding. We are a volunteer-run operation and an offshoot of a program started by Wildfish.org, a UK charity. Two Canadian registered nonprofits, Living Oceans Society in Vancouver and the Atlantic Salmon Federation in St. Andrew’s, NB, paid to design our website and remain partners in the organization. When Off The Table requested a correction from CBC, the response was that the broadcaster would investigate the matter over the next 20 days.
A few days later, a CBC Radio program was a case study in the salmon farming industry’s determination to muddy the waters. Stefanie Colombo, a researcher at Dalhousie University, appeared on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet Nova Scotia and claimed that Off The Table has made false assertions about the health value of farmed salmon. She praised farmed Atlantic salmon as a healthy source of protein and when the interviewer asked if farmed salmon are a “factory product,” she replied, “Absolutely not.”
The show failed to mention Colombo’s extensive, long-standing ties to the aquaculture industry, and particularly salmon farming. She is on the board of the Nova Scotia Fisheries and Aquaculture Loan Board, an organization established to support aquaculture. She is a past president of the Aquaculture Association of Canada and a current adviser to the Aquaculture Association of Nova Scotia. She also speaks regularly in support of salmon farming and aquaculture in general at industry events.
Contrary to CBC’s own published standards, no one from our organization or any other group opposed to salmon farming was invited to offer an alternative view. Had we been allowed to present the full picture, we would have talked about the concerns that are well-documented on our website and by settled, peer-reviewed science. We would have explained that farmed salmon spend 12 to 22 months trapped in sea cages made of plastic mesh, suspended from a floating platform, a short distance from the shoreline. A single farm may contain as many as 16 pens, each one holding 100,000 salmon or more.
We would have explained that the plastic mesh of the cages allows excrement, excess feed and residue from antibiotics and other chemicals to flow freely into the surrounding waters. The farms operate as open sewers, depending on tides and currents to flush the waste away. We would have described how the ocean floor surrounding the pens suffocates under a thick layer of feces, feed and dead fish. The feed may be laced with drugs used to fight disease and the voracious parasites that devour the salmon’s skin. The toxic stew emanating from the farms contains viruses, bacteria and parasites capable of infecting juvenile salmon and other organisms. We would have told listeners that 865 million farmed salmon died before they would be harvested in a recent 10-year period. This, we would have said, is a clear definition of a “factory product.”
We would have pointed out that the Canadian government says the aquaculture industry used 10,260 kilograms of antibiotics in 2022, raising the risk of transferring antibiotic resistance to consumers. We would have discussed the impact on wildlife of the plastic floats, pipes, netting, and other debris released into the water by salmon farms. It litters beaches and creates microplastics that can be ingested by marine life from the smallest plankton to seabirds and whales.
The 2004 study of contaminants changed the conversation about the benefits of farmed salmon by raising serious health concerns. Since then, salmon farming has expanded dramatically into a $20 billion a year behemoth that puts profits ahead of public good, papering over the negatives with glossy PR campaigns.
Opposition to these floating feedlots has expanded, too, everywhere farmed salmon are raised on the ocean. We will continue to fight the industry’s disinformation efforts with science-based facts in partnership with chefs, restaurants, fish sellers, the public and our partner organizations in the United Kingdom, Iceland and Australia.