Feedlot salmon
vs. wild salmon

Do you eat salmon? Lots of doctors are recommending it. But there’s more to salmon than meets the eye. If you haven’t seen the word “wild” at the market or on the menu, the salmon you’re eating is probably farmed. Farmed salmon are raised in floating feedlots in Chile, Canada, Europe, and the United States. And that spells trouble. For you, for wild salmon, and for the oceans.

How can a food be so inexpensive in the supermarket but so costly both to our well-being and the environment? It’s because the economic groundrules hide the real costs.

In the case of farmed salmon, those rules allow raw sewage to pour into coastal waters, and fatal epidemics to spread from farmed to wild fish. Meanwhile, the industry dodges the bill, leaving you, me, and our children to pick up the tab.

Many people think that buying farmed salmon saves wild fish. Think again.

Salmon farms don’t protect wild salmon. Instead, they infect wild fish with parasites and diseases, and compete for precious habitat when farmed fish escape their pens.

These problems can spell disaster for wild fish. In British Columbia, at least three rivers have now been populated by escaped Atlantic salmon, an invader to our Pacific waters that competes with native fish. In Norway, the government has resorted to the deliberate poisoning of whole rivers to wipe out the spread of a parasite from a farming hatchery.

Now that we recognize these problems, it’s time to demand that salmon farmers clean up their act. The farms can improve by raising the fish on land, in ponds whose waste is treated before it is released into the sea. That would at least isolate them from the wild fish they are harming.

Salmon farming expanded from just 10% of global salmon production in 1986 to 58% in 2001 — much faster than our understanding of its impacts. As a result, salmon farmers have been getting a free ride. It’s time for them to start covering the true costs.

Facts & Footnotes




Farmed salmon color selection fan

Wild salmon get their beautiful hue from the prey they eat. But their farmed cousins rely on a dye to color their flesh pink. Without that added pigment, their meat would be a pale gray.

Selling authenticity short



The fishmeal and fish oil fed to farmed salmon are more contaminated with dioxins than any other livestock feeds, according to a study by the European Union. As a result, an analysis of British Columbian salmon found that farmed salmon was nearly ten times higher in PCBs than the wild variety.

A pure food no more



Farmed salmon are raised in open cages, thousands of them in a net-pen the size of a small house. Usually, a dozen or so of these pens are tethered together. The fish pass their feces right into the waters around them, contaminating the water with as much raw sewage as a town of 65,000.

Treating the ocean like a cesspool



Family fisherman RJ Kopchak, Cordova, Alaska

The salmon farming industry is controlled by a short list of global corporations -- just four companies produce more than half of the farmed salmon sold in North America. By flooding the market with their product, they’ve put harvesters of wild fish -- and the communities that depend on them -- in an economic squeeze.

Curtains for local fishing communities



Diseases and infestations can spread rapidly in crowded pens where salmon are raised. Fish farmers dose their fish to combat these outbreaks, using seven tons of antibiotics in British Columbia in 1998 alone.

Still, epidemics can infect and decimate wild stocks. The 2002 collapse of the pink salmon run on the central B.C. coast is blamed on parasites known as sea lice, contracted from the area’s numerous salmon farms.

A wild world in peril



2,162,000 tons of fish taken from the oceans to produce 871,200 tons of farmed salmon

Salmon aren’t your everyday livestock -- they’re carnivores. Their feed is made from mackerel, sardines, and other smaller fish, but something is lost in the translation. It takes nearly two and a half pounds of smaller fish to raise one pound of farmed salmon -- reducing the amount of seafood by 59 percent.

Emptying the oceans
   

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