News Coverage
Trouble on the Farm
Raising fish in captivity seems like a logical and ecological alternative to emptying the oceans
Published September 28, 2003
Here's a 21st century fish story: Improving technologies and dwindling fish stocks are feeding a world-wide boom in fish-farming.
It sounds like a simple solution to a global problem, but a fierce, three-way fight has erupted among the industry, environmentalists and scientists.
The aquaculture industry says that environmentalists are warning of problems with fish farming are "fear-mongering."
In the third corner of the ring wary scientists are putting farmed salmon under the microscope, questioning whether it's as safe to eat as the wild fish.
Salmon is special. It's one of Canada's favourite foods. Not- withstanding what the scientists are finding it has been considered good for us. All those omega-3 fatty acids lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke; much is made, certainly by the fishing industry, about salmon as a potential fighter of depression, Alzheimer's disease, childhood asthma, cancer, diabetes and kidney disease. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency sets no limit on the amount of salmon we can consume every week.
Salmon is also the number one fish being farmed.
British Columbia and New Brunswick are Canada's biggest producers, with giant marine cages, formed by thick poly rope, holding as many as 100,000 fish per net, with up to one million fish per site, floating in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
Fish farming generates revenues of more than $390 million in B.C. and $270 million in New Brunswick, making up the largest agricultural exports from these two provinces.
Globally, by 2001, aquaculture accounted for 34 per cent - 48 million tonnes - of the fish we eat, including cultivated clams, mussels, oysters and shrimps, the latter produced primarily in Southeast Asia. (Lobsters roam free, so far.) Wild-fisheries provided 66 per cent of our seafood, or 93.7 million tonnes.
But just as concerns have been raised about cattle fattened in huge feedlots, now there's a focus on fish fattened in cages.
The U.S. Environmental Working Group (EWG), as recently reported by CBS News, "found 70 per cent of (farmed) salmon tested contained PCB levels higher than EPA recommendations ... Similar studies in the U.K., Ireland and Canada found comparable results."
The farmed salmon assessed by the EWG had 16 times more PCBs than wild salmon.
Earlier, USA Today reported on another study by a Canadian scientist, Michael Easton, an expert in ecotoxicology, who found in a pilot study that farmed salmon, compared to wild salmon, "contained elevated levels of chemical contaminants, including PCBs - known carcinogens."
Published in the peer-reviewed Chemosphere, an international science journal, Easton's research said that particular farmed salmon studied had ten times more PCBs than wild fish and that the levels of contamination posed a health risk to consumers, in his opinion.
The findings are in dispute.
The David Suzuki Foundation, the environmental advocacy group, commissioned the Easton study, says Nell Halse, president of the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance, which has attacked Easton's findings.
"He only studied four fish. Those four fish, and that study by the Environmental Working Group, are responsible for all the controversy that's plaguing us."
Halse's pointedness conveys the heated nature of the fish-farming debate. "It's just fear mongering," he says of the PCB finding. She says the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has been clear that PCB levels in Bay of Fundy salmon, in her region, are well below acceptable levels.
The Suzuki Foundation says the tests were a pilot project and larger studies are coming. "The analysis," Otto Langer says, "is expensive."
Health-risk assessment is a sensitive, tricky business. Polychlorinated biphenyls were banned in the mid-1970s after being used in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications including "electrical, heat transfer and hydraulic equipment; as plasticizers in paints, plastics and rubber products; in pigments, dyes and carbonless copy paper and many other applications," reports the United States Environmental Protection Agency Web site. "More than 1.5 billion pounds of PCBs were manufactured in the United States prior to cessation of production in 1977."
Under "adverse health affects," the EPA states that "PCBs are probable human carcinogens," in addition to demonstrating a negative impact on the "immune system, reproductive system, nervous system, endocrine system and other health effects."
So PCBs are everywhere in the environment, and harmful. But the question of what is, in fact, an acceptable level persists.
"The types of PCBs that tend to bioaccumulate in fish and other animals and bind to sediments happen to be the most carcinogenic compounds of PCB mixtures," the EPA states. People who ingest PCB-contaminated fish "may be exposed to PCB mixtures that are even more toxic than the PCB mixtures contacted by workers and released into the environment."
Sensibly, the position of the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance is that "we don't want to hide from the problem," says its executive director David Rideout. "We're not putting PCBs into (fish) pellets, PCBs are everywhere. But if there's something we can stop doing, we'll stop. We just want the government to put policies in place so we can move forward."
The European Union and World Health Organization set out more stringent levels than North American jurisdictions.
But concerns about fish farming - which seems so logical as an answer to overfishing natural stocks - expand beyond the PCB question.
For the past decade, the Suzuki Foundation has been warning about the dangers of crowded cages that expose farmed and wild fish to diseases, pollute the surrounding seas and seabed, and require the use of antibiotics.
Such concerns have helped turn the spotlight on alternative methods of farming fish, including traditional methods used in China for thousands of years.
The Chinese - "by far the world leaders in fish farming," says George Chamberlain, president of the U.S.-based Global Aquaculture Alliance - have been raising carp in captivity for at least 3500 years. More than 80 per cent of the world's farmed fish is produced in China, where the method of cultivating carp is "more sustainable," says the Suzuki Foundation's Otto Langer. "The Chinese raise carp in ponds or tanks. They're not in the ocean and they're not impacting marine life."
Carp also eat vegetation as opposed to fish meal; the latter's main ingredients include anchovies, mackerel and fish oil.
The Suzuki Foundation says it takes up to two kilos or more of wild fish to produce 500 grams of farmed salmon. "Anchovies and mackerel are usually taken out of the ocean near developing countries," says the foundation's Jean Kavanagh. Thus, she says, "The fish farming process represents a net loss of protein from the ocean."
Rideout disputes her figures. "It takes 1.4 pounds of feed to make 1 pound of farmed salmon. It used to be higher but that was before the industry got a handle on it. In comparison, 1 pound of beef requires 7 pounds of feed. As well, there's a lot of research to get to grain-based feed for salmon."
The business of modern-day, high tech fish farming was pioneered in Norway and Scotland, funded by North Sea oil revenues. It costs a minimum of $1 million to set up a fish farm, with hatcheries where salmon eggs are mixed with milt (sperm) and hatchlings are tricked by manipulation of light into smelting (maturing) faster. They are anaesthetized, vaccinated and raised in fresh water tanks for a year before being trucked to sea sites.
Norwegian companies such as Stolt Sea Farms and Cermac Inc., and Nutreco Holding NV (Netherlands), lead the industry with big operations on Canada's coasts. George Weston Ltd., parent company of supermarket chain Loblaws, became a major player in Canada through its start-up of Heritage Salmon in the early 1990s. Headquartered in New Brunswick, Heritage also farms salmon in B.C., Maine and Chile. "We're one of the largest in North America but we're much smaller than the Norwegians," says Weston's Geoff Wilson.
Chile burst onto the scene in recent years, attracting giant multinationals to its long coastline with cheap labour ($8 a day) and "more relaxed regulatory climate," in the words of one Canadian official who asked not to be named. Norwegian companies control 30 per cent of Chile's salmon production; Norway's former fisheries minister has called for an investigation into environmental and labour conditions in Chilean fish farms, where unsanitary conditions are alleged.
An oversupply of cheaply produced Chilean salmon "caused a drop in price," says Weston's Wilson, "creating a difficult pricing environment." Last year the wholesale market price of salmon fell under $2 a pound but it's moving up, he says, and Loblaws' sales are still "growing in double digits," despite the PCB controversy.
"The market has lots of room to grow," says Nell Halse, who also wears a hat as general manager of the New Brunswick Salmon Growers Association, "but we have to be careful how we expand."
For Mary Ellen Walling, executive director of the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association, the problems facing the industry are complex. Technological innovation remains a focus for fish farmers, she says, citing tests of a new permeable net that would solve the problem of fish escaping while allowing waste and feed to flush out to sea.
Environmentalists' concerns about protecting wild Pacific salmon against competition from Atlantic salmon - which are farmed on the west coast because they grow fatter quicker - are legitimate, Walling says.
"For us (British Columbians), wild salmon needs to come first. We have a vibrant wild salmon industry and it has to be protected." But it's not protected, according to the Stanford Fisheries Policy Project, which noted the loss of employment along the Pacific coast for Native and non-native communities as wild stocks decline.
Wild Pacific salmon don't adjust well to being farmed, and most of the research done in Norway, Scotland and Ireland focused, naturally, on Atlantic salmon. So Atlantic salmon became the standard - and a threat to Pacific salmon.
Walling acknowledges that fish farming, in its early days in B.C., gave critics lots to protest. "In the 1970s and early 1980s we had small operations that were not well sited, they didn't have a lot of money or experience and there were lots of escapees."
As the industry consolidated in the 1980s - a process now underway in New Brunswick - "there was a focus on improving practices," Walling says. "There have been no significant escapes in the last three years. R and D is on-going to address the issues."
As Walling sees it, "Just as environmental groups focused on forests and Clayoquot Sound, now they've turned their attention to aquaculture. They're funded by some wealthy U.S. environmental foundations and it's difficult for our small industry to combat their attacks."
"Our industry is stalled," says David Rideout, executive director of the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance. "The public policy makers are timid, in terms of decision making, and they're holding us back."
The process of getting licence approvals for fish farms under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act - with federal and provincial governments getting in on the act - can drag on for two to four years, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"We're not saying every site should be approved," Rideout says. "If there are problems, we'll address them. Tell us where we can farm. We want action."
Recently Bloomberg News reported a Canadian study showing that wild Pacific salmon are polluting Alaskan lakes as they return to their home spawning ground. Migrating hundreds of miles from the ocean - with PCBs absorbed from their food contaminating their cells - they act as "biological pumps," University of Ottawa biologist Jules Blais said, "by transporting contaminants upstream, where pollutants may affect their offspring and predators such as bears, eagles and humans."
On the PCB question, Rideout says, "This is a serious problem for the industry in general. It brings about consumer confusion."
But University of Ottawa associate biology professor Jules Blais says it's "very difficult for Health Canada to regulate thousands and thousands of chemicals based on limited animal studies."
"We're environmental toxicologists, we look at the fate of pollutants in the environment, where they go, how they accumulate in the body. We know there's evidence of PCB exposure linked to declining fertility rates in humans and developmental affects on children exposed in utero, performing poorly on memory tests and having higher rates of attention deficit disorder."
With every step up the food chain, he says, PCBs increase in concentration. And with different safety standards expressed by the EPA, the FDA and WHO, he says, it's clear that "this is an evolving situation."
No one really knows, in other words, what is a safe level.
On the policy front, Rideout says, "There are two parallel issues of equal importance: consistency of policy in terms of siting, and establishing an animal health program for fish similar to land animals. We need it in terms of exporting our fish around the world."
At the department of Fisheries and Oceans, scientist Sharon McGladdery, a fish disease specialist, says the aquatic animal health program "is in the developmental stages, involving industry, provinces and federal government. We're focussing on the health of both wild and cultured fish." A groundbreaking policy paper should be ready within the year.
Rideout worries that "Canada is losing market share because we can't get sites. We're losing our competitive edge.
``Very few places in the world are as ideal for fish farming. We have this huge potential in terms of water mass and the best food safety regulations in the world, but we need to let our industry farm."