Fish Farm Licences to Use Ocean as a Free, Open Sewer

Question: The open net pens [in Norway] are no longer allowed to get new licenses (or renewed). Last ones issues in 2014 at auction for 1--13 MILLION Canadian each. Not sure about numbers of fish per site (typically 1 million) nor about lease duration. D might know?

Answer:  Norway changed the ball game.

What they did was end the auctioning off of in-ocean licences in 2014. This article says, at the bottom, 66 million Kroner. Multiply it by the exchange rate .16 and you get $10.56 million: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-construction/hurricanes-harvey-irma-lift-u-s-factory-activity-index-to-13-year-high-idUSKCN1C71RJ. 

You will find the $9- to $12-million figure I use in other articles. 80 million Kroner is $12.8M, for instance. The BC licence cost, by comparison, is a pitiful $5000 or .04% of the $12M figure. Hence the reason we are subsidizing fish farms to trash our oceans.

You would have to check whether getting a licence is tied to a lease of a particular spot. I don’t think it is. The reason for the high price is that fish farms are a licence to print money, and so, there has been a long-term speculative market, including people who had no intention of farming, just resold the licences. Kjersti Sandvik’s book, Under the Surface, covers this issue.

The licences Norway gives out for on-land are free, and thus a $9 - $12-Million subsidy. Note that the original licences are still in the water. There are 1100, or ten times the number of licences in BC.

Norway does issue some in-ocean licences for concepts that reduce environmental damage, the egg by Marine Harvest, for instance: https://www.google.ca/search?q=Marine+Harvest+-+egg+concept+-+artist+rendering&dcr=0&tbm=isch&imgil=zEYXtZ5QezA_kM%253A%253B4IIbLOaEF_EL2M%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Faquaculturenorthamerica.com%25252Fresearch%25252Fmarine-harvest-tests-closed-egg-shaped-fish-pens%25252F&source=iu&pf=m&fir=zEYXtZ5QezA_kM%253A%252C4IIbLOaEF_EL2M%252C_&usg=__Z4pAEdxo9BPUjuR499EPgI3QEw0%3D&biw=957&bih=419&ved=0ahUKEwjVku_hwtLWAhVP0WMKHbYmD3kQyjcINQ&ei=H3_SWZWHFM-ijwO2zbzIBw#imgdii=DcHvMZQow-i0MM:&imgrc=zEYXtZ5QezA_kM:. Note that the purpose is to save salmon from lice, and there are two pipes off the bottom, one for water in, and the other would have to be for water/sewage flowing out, but that is something MH does not talk about.

Note that the industry is trying now to get off shore, open ocean licences, for much larger farms, presumably to keep them from public scrutiny and thus release far more sewage. We need to stop them.

As for fish in a usual size farm, that would be 600,000 to 1,000,000, but you would have to do some research to get a link.