Seafood Watch Green washes NZ Chinook In-ocean, Open-Net Fish Farm - Updated March 14, 2015

Seafood Watch Green washes NZ Chinook In-ocean, Open-Net Fish Farm

See: http://www.undercurrentnews.com/2015/02/16/seafood-watch-gives-first-green-rating-for-marine-based-farmed-salmon-to-new-zealand-kings/#comment-2666.

Seafood watch, of Monterey Bay Aquarium, formerly a sound judge of environmentally sound and unsound foods, has seriously eroded its own status by certifying a NZ open-net in-ocean fish farm as green. There is no such thing as an in-ocean open-net fish farm that is green.

Here are my comments appended after the above article on Undercurrents:

Well, let's see, what about sewage, sea lion deaths, anti-fouling paints, unsustainable feeds, toxic chemicals in feed? I'll bet it won't be long before lice and the chemicals to get rid of them show up. And diseases will arrive soon, to. It is the concentration of fish that makes viruses mutate frequently into killers.

And calling the results of escapes as being okay, because the fish come from a different continent seems pretty anti-environmental to me. In Chile, chinook, coho and steelhead have gotten free only to show up in rivers of pristine Patagonia and all the way around to Argentina.. Argentina is not happy.

In most parts of the world, the sewage output is as much as the entire human population of the country, seems 'red' to me. Check the stats on Norway, Scotland and BC. See: www.fishfarmnews.blogspot.com. There is an index in October 2014.

Also, one of the big environmental problems in Norway right now is the escape of 130,000 PRV and Virus Y infected steelhead. It is pushing even some politicians to say fish farms have to be on land. Go look for the images of these infected fish – that come from Canada, not Norway. You would not eat one.

I would say that Seafood Watch now becomes a listing agency that is no longer about environmentally sound food. Fish farms need to be on land. Sad.

Now, let me update this to March 14, 2015: NZ King salmon has lost several million of its salmon (it will not say how many, because the industry, everywhere I have looked is very keen on secrecy. They want all of their stats, revenue, diseases, lice, killed sea lions, disease testing, to be secret from the people who live in the jurisdiction on the grounds that it is proprietary information and gives competitors advantage, and so on) but says it is several million dollars because fish farm salmon that do okay at 12 - 17 degrees C die at 18 degrees. The ocean stayed above 18 for three months and all the fish died.

This problem, like all the others above, can be solved by putting fish farms on land. On land NZ King would have lost $0 because no fish would have died because closed, recirculating systems can set the temperature at the best rate, and change the photo period too. On land is the only future for fish farms.