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As a friend of the Pacific
Salmon Foundation who cares for wild salmon, you may have read the headlines yesterday
announcing DFO's decision to strengthen certain testing and reporting
measures on salmon farms. Please read our statement below:
Statement of PSF President and CEO Michael Meneer
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Regarding decision to test
for Piscine Orthoreovirus (PRV) in aquaculture salmon
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The Pacific Salmon Foundation
(PSF) welcomes federal Fisheries Minister Jonathan Wilkinson’s decision to
strengthen DFO’s testing and reporting of heart and skeletal muscle
inflammation and jaundice syndrome, and screening for two specific strains
of Piscine Orthoreovirus. This is important and timely action and a step in
the right direction to ensure that the health of wild Pacific salmon is
protected first and foremost.
The upcoming public consultations will be a critical part of
this process and PSF looks forward to contributing. We acknowledge and
thank the many people and organizations, particularly the Namgis First
Nation, for their diligence on this critical salmon issue.
British Columbia and Canada
must put wild Pacific salmon first and we have previously recommended a
move to closed-containment aquaculture. We took this position based
on the combination of information in the Province’s Ministerial Advisory
Committee Report on Finfish Aquaculture; the results of our own research to
date; and the chronically-low abundance of many wild Pacific salmon
populations today.
This transition to closed
containment will take time but the removal of open net-pen farms along
migratory routes of wild Pacific salmon, particularly for those stocks of
greatest concern, should occur as soon as possible. During this
transition, everything possible should be done to improve assessment of the
risks to wild Pacific salmon, including through the salmon pathogen
research of the Strategic Salmon Health Initiative that is being done in
partnership with PSF, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Genome BC.
Since 2013, PSF has supported
the Strategic Salmon Health Initiative to study interactions between wild,
hatchery and aquaculture salmon and the presence of microbes that could
impact the health and survival of Pacific salmon. We will continue to
engage in this issue and are prepared to assist the provincial and federal
government in these new initiatives to support the sustainability and
restoration of our wild Pacific salmon!
Links:
DFO
Announcement
PSF
Position on Acquaculture in BC
Strategic
Salmon Health Initiative
The PSF Position, from the link above, is the same: "The Pacific Salmon Foundation (PSF) believes that British Columbia and
Canada must put wild Pacific salmon first and that a move to
closed-containment salmon aquaculture is recommended. " And: "This transition to closed containment will take time but the removal of
open net-pen farms along migratory routes of wild Pacific salmon,
particularly for those stocks of greatest concern, should occur as soon
as possible."
The PSF ends by saying it will help other participants in this process.
The Strategic Salmon Health Initiative, in partnership with the PSF and DFO, is looking at diseases and has found HSMI and PRV in farmed salmon, not to mention jaundice/anemia in wild chinook. Really?! This is where one half of DFO is saying PRV exists and causes problems while the other half says: 'Science, what science? There is no science.'
See the PSF news release: https://www.psf.ca/what-we-do/strategic-salmon-health-initiative.
The DFO announcement on their site is:
Government of Canada takes further action to enhance aquaculture sustainability in British Columbia
So, this doesn't sound much like closed containment and putting fish farms on land. Hubristic governments have been chasing the unsustainability of the unsustainable fish farm industry for the past 50 years around the world. And it has only gotten worse, as fish farms destroy the oceans they are put in. Only the nation's citizens seem to notice as govts are wilfully blind and dumb.
The humour in this is that the best newspaper in BC gets it wrong because reporting the news is a vastly different beast from analyzing the stories before writing.
The one link is Stan Proboszcz writing that DFO refused to give the science to the committee scientists, and so is fake science, as in we don't use 'evidence and science' that doesn't agree with our narrative. DFO had the temerity to say all the scientists that they kept the science from agreed that IHN didn't harm Fraser sockeye, when, as Stan pointed out, was about IHN vaccinated fish not transmitting IHN!
Stan pointed out that the DFO ruse suggested they would do it again, and shortly thereafter, DFO got a DFO scientist to write a tentative paper on PRV in BC, while DFO scientists Di Cicco and Miller showed that PRV and HSMI were in BC farmed fish, and that PRV caused jaundice/anemia in wild chinook.
As I said, I ain't holding my breath.
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You can read the 'evidence and science' issue here: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2019/06/prv-dfo-doesnt-do-evidence-and-science.html.
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Here in BC, DFO has refused scientific evidence on harm and killing of wild salmon by PRV four times now: https://alexandramorton.typepad.com/alexandra_morton/2020/01/the-virus-prv-brings-out-the-worst-in-dfo.html?fbclid=IwAR1RVl5HttXekuttvJChNOwu51SufY3oxLT3uc7hZ_TScKjBL5nyr0siMuE. |
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