Fishy Denials

Scotland's No. 1 food export is fish-farmed Atlantic salmon.

Last year, almost $786 million worth of Scottish salmon was exported globally, with the United States as its largest market. The aquaculture industry, which already contributes $2.85 billion to the U.K. economy, has ambitious targets for growth. The Scottish Salmon Producers' Organization, the main industry group, aims to more than double production to as much as 400,000 tons by 2030.

That growth, however, comes with high costs for Scotland's environment according to a government report, which echoes the concerns of environmental and community groups. The report, part of an ongoing inquiry by the Scottish Parliament's Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee, found that the country's farmed salmon sector is reaching a critical point in which "the status quo is not an option."

"If the current issues are not addressed," the report says, plans for expansion "may cause irrecoverable damage to the environment."

The link between Scotland's wild fish declines and the rise of salmon farms is one of the many points of contention between pro- and anti-fish farming interests.

On the one side are the aquaculture businesses, and the supporters of the 2,472 jobs that the sector brought to the Scottish Highlands in 2016. On the other side are wild fish advocates, environmental organizations, and coastal community groups concerned about the sector's environmental impacts.

Government reports lay out the environmental issues — as well as responses to them — such as sea lice infestations, disease outbreaks, fish escapes, feed sustainability, and biological and medical waste. Because Scottish salmon farms consist of large, open metal cages that sit above the seabed, everything that goes in or comes out also affects the marine ecologies surrounding them. The reports note that the issues in this year's review are not new; they were in fact highlighted in an earlier government inquiry from 2002 and, according to the new data, the sector has made little progress in addressing them since then. Instead, the salmon industry has continued to grow, with each new or expanded fish farm amplifying the negative impact on the environment. This year's reports conclude that the industry's ambitious growth targets fail to "take into account the capacity of the environment to farm that quantity of salmon."

Pro-aquaculture interests, such as the Scottish Salmon Producers' Organization(SSPO), the largest industry group,contend that "any potential impacts on wild fish are not understood, and the science is particularly lacking for Scotland." The SSPO says that many of the studies rely too heavily on data from Norway and Ireland, but "Scotland is different in many regards, for example, in its regulatory framework, farming environment, and scale of production."

For Dr. Richard Luxmoore, a conservation advisor for the nonprofit National Trust for Scotland, SSPO's questioning of the science is just "mental acrobatics" in an attempt to "highlight uncertainty and undermine the overwhelming evidence."

"It's the same species of fish in both places. Ireland is south of Scotland and Norway is north," says John Aitchison, a documentary filmmaker who led a successful community petition against a planned farm site in the Sound of Jura in western Scotland.

Aitchison continues, "And it's the same fish that go to the same places. All their life cycles are the same, so you could turn that question on its head and say, on what basis do you think this wouldn't apply to them if it's close to those two countries with oceans straddling Scotland?"

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/10/17/657539821/scotlands-2-billion-salmon-industry-is-thriving-but-at-what-cost