Fish Farms are Floating Pig Farms - Daniel Pauly, UBC

"The conditions of traditional salmon farms can only be compared to a floating pig farm," says the University of British Columbia's Daniel Pauly, a renowned marine biologist. "Some people argue that every farmed salmon has a wild counterpart that's dead." June, 2015.

(Here is a reference for the pig farm comment: http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/fish-the-new-factory-farmed-animals/. )

This is why I have said that fish farms exist in the ocean so they can use it as a free, open sewer. This seems harsh language, but it’s not, compared with what Daniel Pauly says.

But there is more.  We subsidize fish farms $1.64 million to use our ocean as a free open sewer.  In Norway, they pay $1.69 Million just for a licence. In BC they pay $5000. So we subsidize fish farms to the tune of $1.65 Million just to set up shop in our ocean  and pollute it. Not smart.

And how much does that sewage damage cost? My preliminary estimate, using the conservative conversion rate of 10 fish for the sewage of 1 human being, comes out at the very large subsidy of: $10.4 Billion. We BC taxpayers pay this much for the industry as it is today. And they want to expand? (See the Oct 2014, Index, on this site, for the link to the calculation).

I don’t think so. The people of BC, understandably, want fish farms on land or they can go back to Norway.

I should add that at other conversion rates, the already astronomical sewage cost to BC taxpayers, exceeds $31 Billion. That is how bad fish farms are. Hmm. Now I see why Daniel Pauly says they are floating pig farms.

And, how big is that licence subsidy you ask? Well, at $1.65 M per farm, and 130 licences in BC, the licencing subsidy comes in at a whopping $214.5 Million in BC alone. That is in addition to the sewage figure. Fish farms don't make much money and don't result in many jobs, and still we subsidize them to the point where their revenue (from BC Stats) of $400 M comprises only 3.8 % of the environmental damage they cause just from being in our oceans. This does not make sense