Fish Farm Problems on a Global Scale - Inka Milewski, Ruth E. Smith Updated May 9, 2020

Over the decades since the 1980s, DFO has had various reports made. At the same time, fish farms went from small operations to being bought out by the mega-country, mega-billion Norwegian fish farm companies, Mowi Harvest, Cermaq (Mitsubishi), Grieg Seafood and a few more. The foreign multinationals swooped in on the small operators and bought them up after they went belly up, dreams ruined. Disasters are common in fish farming, and they ruin local individuals but not foreign corps with lots of $$.

The following paper is the best, shortest document that I have ever read that gives you the global story on fish farm problems. You must go and read the whole thing.

The paper (see link just below) points out that:

"The shift from small-to industrial-scale salmon farming has brought with it all the issues characteristic of industrial food-production systems. These include: waste-product pollution (feces, feed) [29], use of chemical and veterinary products (antibiotics, pesticides) [30], environmental
quality issues (nutrient and organic loading) [31], off-farm pathogen transmission [32] and farm escapes [33], human health concerns [34], devolution of state-led control to corporate/market-driven
governance [26,35–37], and increased control by large-scale processor and retailers (value chain) on seafood systems [38–40]. As a result, the development trajectory of farmed salmon production globally, and in Canada, has been uneven and marked by periods of reduced production due to a range of issues including disease (e.g. infectious salmon anemia, piscine reovirus) and parasite (sea lice) outbreaks, increased global competition, price fluctuations, availability of suitable farm sites, and moratoria [25,26,41]."

The cited references may be found in the document: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X19301332. Please go and read it.

The paper notes that, for their 2012 report, DFO left out of the process: "... representatives from national and regional environmental, fisher, consumer, and social/community development organizations [19]."

Hmm.

Furthermore: "The selection of potential indicators such as escaped fish, sourcing of fish feed, traceability, and certification (Table 1) is a tacit acknowledgement of the primacy of salmon aquaculture in Canada and the influence of global seafood commodity chains on production." And just so that you know, salmon production ranks in at ninth globally, not first, as fish farms would have you believe, when they sucker in governments with their jobs and revenue promises.

The sustainability indicators (SI) are in Table 1, in the right hand column.

Moving on, DFO is remiss:

"Environmental sustainability indicators identified in the scientific literature for finfish aquaculture operations, such as salmon farms, include the quantity of resources used (e.g. water, energy, space, feed and amount of raw marine ingredients), waste discharges (nitrogen, phosphorus, particulate organic matter, greenhouse gasses, metals), chemicals use (e.g. antibiotics, pesticides, hormones), disease incidence, escaped fish, genetic interactions, and biodiversity impacts [42–46]. To date with two exceptions (antibiotics and drugs), DFO does not publicly report on any of the aforementioned environmental indicators nor does it report on the environmental SI identified in Table 1."

Instead: "DFO reports on industry's compliance with environmental regulations as an indicator of the sustainability of aquaculture [47,48]."

The issue here is whether there are any regulations, whether they make sense, whether they measure sustainability, whether fish farms follow them, whether there are conservation officers to follow up and whether fish farms are taken to court for failing to meet the measures. The paper shows a lot of problems with DFO, but stops at 'whether fish farms follow them'. The rest, the teeth of it all, is not discussed, which is to say, there are no teeth. And of course, the regs don't spell out sustainability.

Just how bad can it be when fish farms need to report something? This bad: "Compliance with these new regulations means aquaculture operators are now required to report the quantity and frequency of drugs and pesticides use. In 2016 and 2017, marine finfish operators used 16.8 mt and 14.4 mt of antibiotics and 617 mt and 439 mt of pesticides (hydrogen peroxide) respectively [51]."

Doesn't this make you want to eat farmed salmon? Of course they are not doing much to measure the effects on the natural environment, such as effects on lobsters etc. nor the cost of the sewage, which is far more than the deep piles directly under a fish farm. The rest floats away on ocean currents and contributes to eutrophication on a vast scale.

And what did the scientists find? This: "Monitoring sub-lethal, cumulative, and far-field (beyond the farm lease) effects of sequential exposure to antibiotics and pesticides on non-target species is not required."

Not required? Hmm.

And, there is more: "monitoring the cumulative and far-field impacts of waste discharges are also not required." That means sewage. This is the point and why I did the sewage cost we pay in BC, and you will recall that that amount came to $10.4B, meaning the sewage costs far outstrips the economic benefit from fish farms in BC. And there is that eutrophication that is not measured. And the $10.4B is the conservative end of conservative sewage costs. The other end of conservative in BC is, if you can believe it: $31.2B. That is how bad the externality of sewage is, as economists might term it. So we pay for sewage, not the person who buys the salmon.

And how does a farm make compliance? Well, DFO doesn't keep its stats that way, as in the way they should be kept so that non-compliant ones can be singled out for sanction/fines. DFO does this: "DFO measures compliance rate as a percentage of the farms visited by federal fishery officers where no charges are issued [49]. Currently, there are over 900 finfish and shellfish aquaculture operations in Canada." And, of course, those inspectors need not make a charge.

Oh, and not all farms are investigated annually. Now there is a wrinkle we would not anticipate. And the second point is that you can have a rule, but if you don't investigate, there is no breaking of the rule!

Moving on, what about the fish farm claim that they bring jobs, jobs, jobs, making politicians swoon to help them.

Well, here is the post I did with the two tables of BC Stats figures - revenue, jobs and so on: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2019/03/mar-21-2019-bc-stats-report-2016.html.  In BC, since 2000 fish farm jobs have actually fallen 5.3%, that's falling employment for almost 20 years. And their contribution to the economy, as in GDP, has also fallen for the past decade. See item 8 in this highlighted post.

And in the paper, it points out that companies won't release actual job and revenue, making it pretty much impossible to make a realistic set of indicators to relate the economic viability of the sector. Here it says, because DFO can't get: "access to farm-level financial and production data as many farms regard such data as confidential [53]." And the industry funded studies come in at 400% higher than, in BC, the BC Stats report figures.

Now, back to the paper. It has this to say about job claims: "DFO identified employment in aquaculture as a social SI, but has not developed an employment target. One possible reason may be that the potential for expanding direct employment in aquaculture is continually being undermined by technological improvements that enhance economic efficiencies but reduce the amount of labour needed for production. Between 2007 and 2016, overall Canadian aquaculture production increased 18% but direct employment in the sector dropped 32% [24]. Nowhere is the impact from improved technological efficiencies more evident than in Norway which grows almost ten times (1.33 million tonnes in 2014) more farmed salmon than Canada (134,000 mt) but does so with slightly more than twice the direct labour force (6,300 people) than that of Canada (3,205 people) [23,24]. In addition since the mid-2000s, increased and significant reliance on the Canadian government's Temporary Foreign Worker Program by aquaculture" So no jobs for locals who are down on their luck.

Again, this comes from the first paper above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X19301332.

(I should add that when the numbers are based on Stats Can assembled stats, the caveat that is made loud and clear is that for small industries, the stats can be far off and are not useful for comparison purposes. The BC Stats Reports make this clear, and fish farms are small.)

Now, to pick up the automation point: that means that Canada will likely suffer the same loss of employment, as the Norwegian companies move to make the same automation steps here and thus eliminate jobs and their pesky salaries. The above stats suggest that if Canada's output is about 10% of Norway, that 10% of Norway's job numbers is all it will take to farm in Canada, or about 630 jobs. Even if you believe the 3,205 number of Canadian jobs, what would be left would be less than 20% of the current job numbers (630/3205 = 19.6%)

Furthermore, the BC Stats Report stats says there are 1,800 multiplier jobs in aquaculture in BC (and, fish farms are 90% of aquaculture), and my investigation leads me to believe that there are only 850 actual jobs at the politest top end in BC; that implies only 170 actual jobs (850X.2=170) after automation steps in to eliminate pesky humans. And the multiplier jobs would be 360 jobs (1800X.2=360). (And just so that you know, the latest automation is a completely robotic processing facility requiring zero people, now used in China).

Do we want an industry that causes us $10.4B in sewage costs, and all the rest, like the 50 lice per farmed salmon in Clayoquot Sound, 18 times the DFO limit, and all the other problems like disease, and so on, for the tiny number of 170 jobs? I ask you, does this make sense? No, it doesn't.

The report goes on to talk about social licence (SLO) where the farms are, as in do the communities engage and receive good things from them? The paper says: "The social conditions for meaningful community engagement in SLO negotiations such as knowledge, credibility, power, and trust are key elements in SLO negotiations [59,63–65]. DFO has yet to develop an objective measure or indicator to assess when, and if, SLO has been achieved."

And if you go read a recent post of mine, you will find that the vast majority of BC residents, 75% want fish farms out of the water and put on land. In other words, there is no social licence in BC. Little wonder why DFO can't make an 'objective measure'. But that doesn't stop them shoving fish farms down BC throats. Isn't there an election coming up?

See this for the 75%: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2019/06/vast-majority-against-in-ocean-fish.html.

Then the paper goes on to do a case study on Port Mouton Bay, NS. "The role of aquaculture in rural coastal communities has been (and continues to be) a longstanding socioeconomic narrative and sustainable development policy goal for the Canadian government [13,17,20,22]."

This has always been a fishing community, but with the collapse of cod (because DFO failed to do proper science and then follow it) had to turn to lobster. 28% are involved directly and the rest of the 1100 people all have family in the fishery (similar conditions prevail in many coastal towns).

A fish farm was put in in 1995. And this happened about jobs: "Although farmed salmon production in Nova Scotia has increased 1000% from 1995 (1120 mt) to 2017 (11546 mt), the number of people employed in finfish aquaculture is the same (100) in 2017 as in 1995 and full-time employment has
dropped 86% from 211 in 1995 to 46 in 2017 [72]."

So don't believe fish farms or DFO about jobs. They won't happen and then they will disappear. And remember that automation trend in Norway. It will be brought to a farm near you any day now.

And what happened in the Bay? Well lobsters and crabs moved in to feed on fish feed, but then moved away and catch plummeted.

Then, as happens everywhere fish farms move in, a second fish farm was proposed. The locals were not amused. They noticed the following problems, with only one farm: "such as increased occurrence of nuisance green algae fouling beaches and lobster traps, losses of eelgrass (Zostera marina) habitat, and declining numbers of lobster, clams, scallops, mussels and periwinkles in the Bay [73]."

And government, the prov and feds, that had some environmental measures, the results were, yes you guessed it, not made public.

Hmm.

So locals formed Friends of Port Mouton Bay and managed to get scientists retired/active to do the science needed to prove the problems they had been living through. One study they funded used the DFO system for siting farms and showed that due to the shallow water, low currents and the sills that kept the feces in, that both the site in use and the planned site, "made both locations in Port
Mouton Bay unsuitable for salmon aquaculture [77]."

Of course neither level of govt used their own system, and hadn't done a study. The locals got 7 papers published out of this along with two dozen reports, so they were well armed with the truth. For example, lobster dropped 42% during fish farm feeding and 56% of females did not produce eggs. Etc.

And: "Despite the federal government's long-standing interest in increasing knowledge for regulatory purposes about the impacts of aquaculture operations on wild fish (and shellfish) populations, water quality, and important marine habitat such as eelgrass [82,83], these studies represented the first studies of their kind in Canada." This means that DFO had done zero studies.

And we trust these guys?

Fortunately, the locals prevailed. The new farm was not put in, and the existing one was depopulated of fish. It's licence ends in 2020... just about the time that Cermaq, having the same trouble in BC, wants to move to NS, because things are not going well in BC.

Hmm.

Here is one that would be a real hoot, if it weren't real. The various certification schemes, ASCs, and so on, have environmental, social, governance and culture measures some 2830 indicators in all of the eight schemes looked at. It turns out that the prov/fed/DFO don't have anywhere near the indicators that the certification schemes have, and the ones they do have are, wait for it, not revealed to the public.

The social SIs have become far more important, there being 1427 in the private schemes. And the report says: "A weakness in both the DFO and certification schemes is the absence (DFO) and the
near-absence (certification schemes) of indicators associated with community-level decision-making."

So on the one hand is DFO at zero, with the private certifications at 1427 - on the social side indicators. On the environment side DFO is remiss compared with these systems, and the local govt/social side, it is also 1400 to zero.

And you have to remember that DFO/feds want more aquaculture, more 'Blue Revolution' that Norway has had the rest of us rolling our eyeballs about because it is just a good slogan, when their entire emphasis is on making money. You know: neoliberalism.

Profit margins tell the story. Fish farms are only about money - for the company, that is:



Notice the 80.2% for Korshavn Havbruk. And farther down on the left, the big three are less but they are the size that are so big they weather the catastrophes that happen regularly in fish farms because they refuse to come out of the ocean and set up on land. Those small companies with the gold rush mentality, regularly go under and the biggies, simply come in and acquire them for peanuts, not that licences are cheap, each going for up to $20 million Euros. If the small guy you are buying has four licences, that is $80 million Euros just for those! And they cost so much because you can make hundreds of millions.





So, where overall are we going? Here: "The need for meaningful aquaculture social SI, particularly those relating to governance and decision-making, have emerged over the past few years as one of the most important sustainability issues in aquaculture development because they are entwined with rural and urban community development; the geographic target of most aquaculture
development policies formulated at the international, national, regional or state/provincial level [17,25,42,54,91,92]."

This is where a place like Clayoquot Sound BC could outfox DFO. Just do what Port Mouton Bay did. Befriend some scientists. Do some studies.

After all at a global level govts are studying, at our peril, aquaculture to feed 'a hungry world' as Mowi Harvest likes to tell us. So, scientist Bene [99] looked at 202 scientific papers that examined the contribution of fisheries and aquaculture to improving food security, nutrition and poverty in developing and emergent countries.

"Their analysis revealed no evidence to support the claim that a higher consumption of fish results in higher nutritional status, that an increased supply of farmed or wild fish had a direct effect on the micronutrient status of households and/or consumers and concluded that the protein contribution of fish to nutritional status was overstated [99]. The share of protein intake derived from plants far exceeds animal protein in general, and fish-protein in particular [102]."

You wouldn't know it from fish farms, but in fact: "World agricultural food production has now outpaced population growth by a significant margin [103,104]. The world now produces more than enough food, including animal protein, to satisfy the dietary needs of the entire global population [105]."

Despite this: "oversupply of food, more than 800 million people suffer from hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition." And not one of them will ever have enough money to buy even one farmed Atlantic salmon, raised by Mowi Harvest, Cermaq, or Grieg Seafood, from Norway, in their 'blue' revolution.

And what did the paper conclude? There is: "virtually no evidence to support decades-long narratives" about [fish farm] sustainability in Canada." And that's a wrap.

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Press on profs disagreeing: Jon Grant on the other side, in a Cooke Aqua funded chair, as in Ka-ching: 272. Dalhousie Profs Disagree on Fish Farms - Port Mouton Bay, NS: https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/news/local/dal-fish-farm-study-claims-data-lacking-but-another-researcher-calls-work-opinion-piece-326111/. See, also, item 253 below. And search this for many articles on the subject: Dalhousie profs disagree on fish farms, Port Mouton Bay.

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And here is a link to automation in Chile that will lead to fewer humans on fish farms around the world: Humans Need Not Apply - Chile, and anywhere else, soon, this automated feed and fish behaviour gear and software, gives farmers 'tools' such as sitting in the office looking at cameras on fish, and feed, rather than being on the farm doing both functions. As it: Humans Need Not apply: https://www.undercurrentnews.com/2019/11/28/cageeye-predicts-chile-can-boost-salmon-farm-efficiency-by-embracing-automation/?utm_source=Undercurrent+News+Alerts&utm_campaign=1d0403315c-Americas_briefing_Nov_28_2019&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_feb55e2e23-1d0403315c-92426209. This is only one automated system that gets rid of people, though fish farms won't admit it. They might say it allows better checks on their fish and better use of staff time, but not that it allows 7% reduction in feed and humans Need Not Apply.

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And: jobs and revenue are low in Scotland, just like in BC, in other words, fish farms vastly over state the numbers to get politicians to say yes:  144. Jobs and Revenue Vastly Overestimated - Scotland, revenue by "The study claims that the industry’s gross economic value could have been “exaggerated” by 124 per-cent, while employment levels could be overestimated by 251 per-cent." : https://www.whfp.com/2020/04/30/study-calls-for-halt-to-expansion-of-fish-farming/?mc_cid=0c9bcbde7e&mc_eid=5777c92bcd.BNB May 9.