By Greg Simmons, December 1, 2019
After first denying that they were experiencing any problems, Cermaq (one of the three foreign multinational corporations that control 92 percent of salmon farming production in British Columbia) has now acknowledged recent mass fish die-offs in three of its salmon farms on the west coast of Vancouver Island (Binns Island, Bawden Point and Ross Pass). The admission follows an investigation by Clayoquot Action and the subsequent release of images of trucks hauling dead salmon from a Cermaq processing plant and of barges taking skip-sized biowaste containers full of rotting fish from the farm sites. A brown "oil slick" could be seen seeping from the or feedlots into the waters of the Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and territory of the Ahousat First Nations – waters which at one time teemed with wild salmon. Unfortunately, such occurrences are common-place for an industry that, across the globe, has built a legacy of ecological and social destruction.
The proximate cause of the die-offs was harmful algal blooms. While these can occur naturally, nutrient loading from salmon farms can also be a significant causal factor. And, as with many of the harmful impacts from salmon aquaculture, a line can be drawn to the practice of densely packing fish into cages suspended in the open water. The result is a free exchange of material with the surrounding marine environment – material that includes fish fecal matter, along with uneaten fishmeal and the drugs and pesticides employed by farms in their on-going battle against disease and parasites. A typical salmon ocean-pen contains half a million Atlantic salmon, which collectively emit a level of sewage equivalent to a city of 180,000 people. This untreated nitrogen and phosphorous rich effluent “fertilizes” algae in the environment, leading first to massive over-growth and then die-off. As the algae then decompose, bacteria consume the oxygen in the water creating a hypoxic environment. Unable to escape, the caged-fish suffocate and die. Die-offs from algal blooms are not uncommon in BC. Cermaq’s Clayoquot farms experienced similar events in 2016, for example. And mass farmed-salmon mortalities from blooms have recently occurred in Newfoundland, Norway, and in Chile – the latter killing 39 million Atlantic salmon and caused nearly $800 million in losses.
Photo by Clayquot Action - https://clayoquotaction.org
Algal blooms are but one of the environmental impacts of the intensive agri-industrial farming of an invasive species that is salmon aquaculture. More than 90 percent of the salmon farmed in BC are Atlantic salmon. Escapes from net-pens are regular occurrences, and there is evidence that these fish have established self-sustaining local populations, raising concerns over their out-competition and displacement of native fish. Other affected species include the seals, sea lions, dolphins, otters and other creatures who are either killed by directly by salmon farmers or drown after becoming entangled in salmon farm rigging or predator nets while trying to reach the floating buffet that is a salmon farm. The globalized nature of the industry means that impacts to other species extend beyond the local biotic environment. Salmon are predators that feed on other fish. Ninety percent of harvested forage fish is destined for the fish meal and fish oil industry, and it has been estimated that, as of 2006, the global aquaculture industry utilizes 68.2 percent of total fish meal supplies. Local pelagic fisheries in Chile and Peru, for example, have been devasted by the business of creating fish meal for farmed salmon. Ironically, while the salmon farming corporations and their agents present salmon farming as a sustainable alternative to wild fish, salmon aquaculture is itself dependent on fisheries that are less regulated and even further over-exploited than the displaced British Columbian salmon fisheries that it is ostensibly protecting.
Likely the most significant impact, however, comes from the diseases and parasites that are endemic to salmon farms. Raising hundreds of thousands of fish packed together in cages facilitates the rapid multiplication of disease, and the suspension of open net-pens in the ocean means that diseases introduced through farmed fish cannot be securely contained within the farm site. Pens become “reservoirs of disease,” biomagnifying and shedding pathogens into the marine waters. As with other examples of agri-industrial animal farming, endemic levels of disease also create ideal conditions for the mutation of bacteria and viruses into novel and potentially more virulent forms. Moreover, the siting of farms within the narrow channels and inlets on the migration routes of wild salmon means that these fish have no choice but to come in close proximity to farms and the disease risk they pose.
Nonetheless, the entrenched response pattern on the part of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) has been first to deny the very existence of novel disease associated with salmon farms and then, when the evidence to the contrary becomes overwhelming, attempt to deny or minimize pathogenicity. For instance despite DFO’s continual assertions that highly pathogenic viral diseases associated with salmon farms, such as Infectious Salmon Anemia (ISA) and Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation (HSMI), are not present in British Columbia waters, genetic testing indicated the contrary. In 2015, long-standing anti-salmon farming activist and independent scientist, Alexandra Morton, successfully sued DFO for allowing Marine Harvest to transfer smolts (young fish) infected with Piscine Reovirus into pens on the migration route of Fraser River sockeye. On the basis of that ruling, she again successfully challenged in court the failure of DFO to test the 16 to 52 million smolts that are moved into fish farms every year. Given that the virus is now recognized as endemic to fish farms, the industry itself has admitted that 90 per cent will become infected with PRV. Despite this, DFO refuses to test for the virus and continues to use the uncertainty around the effects of PRV in British Columbia as a basis for classifying the virus as “low-risk.” By way of contrast, the state of Washington has banned open-net pen salmon farms in their waters as of 2025 and in the interim has prohibited the introduction of salmon infected with PRV. Unlike DFO, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) considers the virus to be of such risk as to order that 800,000 farm fish be destroyed rather than put their wild salmon at risk.
The algal bloom die-offs at Cermaq’s Vancouver Island farms come on the heels of sea lice epidemics that the corporation was unable to manage with pesticides or de-licing equipment. Small parasites that attach themselves to the exterior of fish and feed off the mucous or skin, sea lice are common in small numbers on wild adult salmon, where they usually do not cause serious harm to their host. Until the advent of salmon aquaculture, they were not normally observed on juveniles, however. Salmon farms upend the natural pattern of “migratory allopatry” that separates smolts from adult fish, closing the loop and creating a reservoir of adult fish that juvenile salmon come into contact with during their out-migration. The high stocking densities make the farms intense breeding grounds for sea lice, dramatically increasing their numbers in the surrounding waters through which the native smolt travel. Lacking well-developed scales and weighing only a few grams, salmon fry are much more susceptible to attack by sea lice than are their adult counterparts, and data suggests that up to 95 percent of migrating juvenile salmon can be infected
Parasites such as sea lice are traditionally controlled with pesticides. Significant concerns have been raised regarding their potential to accumulate in the environment, adverse effects on aquatic life, and the risk of ingestion by humans via aquatic species affected by pesticide use. The chemical of choice for sea lice control has been emamectin benzoate (marketed as SLICE), a powerful neurotoxin. As with other diseases and pests, the salmon farming corporations are engaged in an “arms race,” as lice on the farms build resistance, prompting ever-more new (and more extreme) measures, including the introduction of hydrogen peroxide fish baths and ships that sluice the salmon – both of which raise animal welfare concerns – and even powerful vacuum cleaners to filter lice out of the sea water The situation for farms in Clayoquot Sound reached such as extreme in 2018 – with never before seen levels of up to 55 lice per farmed fish (the treatment threshold set by DFO is 3 lice per fish ) – that Cermaq applied to employ Lufenuron, a chemical used to treat fleas in pets. Regulators in Norway, the world’s largest producer of farmed salmon and the country where the chemical is manufactured, have not approved Lufeneron for use on farmed salmon given concerns that it renders fish unsafe for human consumption. Health Canada granted approval, however, with a mandatory 350-day waiting period between use and harvest. Lufenuron, which interferes with the production of chitin, prevents sea lice from developing an exo-skeleton. It is non-species specific, however, and has similar effects on a wide range of crustaceans, mollusks and other creatures found in the marine environment.
Considering these environmental harms through the lens of political ecology – the connection between environmental and ecological impacts and prevailing political, economic and social conditions and relations – the environmental threats posed by salmon farming can be seen to originate in an expansionist capitalist industry operating in a globalized market economy. In particular, the most significant environmental harms from salmon aquaculture link directly to intensive agri-industrial production techniques driven by profit maximization: farming of the more profitable non-native Atlantic salmon and the use of open net-pen feedlots stocked to high densities. Whereas for the mostly non-native corporations that operate the farms, raising the faster-maturing Atlantic salmon in the Pacific Ocean makes economic sense, from a local and ecological perspective the overall risks are significantly increased. The threats posed by Atlantic salmon are then compounded by the fact that, in order to minimize production costs and maximize total returns, hundreds of thousands of fish are stocked in pens with only the minimal barrier of a net cage suspended from floats separating these concentrated reservoirs of disease production and dispersal from the surrounding aquatic environment in which they are literally immersed. Enabling the farms to use the marine environment as a sink for waste means that the polluter does not pay – while the oceans and those that depend on them do. Closed containment technology that prevents much of these harmful ecological interactions is available, but salmon farming corporations have long complained that the cost is prohibitive. The increased expense derives from the fact that removing the feedlots from the ocean ends the free use of ecosystem services and the externalization of costs – they end the free ride. Hence, the role of the profit imperative within a capitalist economy in creating the conditions for environmental harm and ecological disorganization from salmon farming is critical.
In this context, a strong case can be made that successive provincial and federal governments and the agencies charged with the environmental oversight of salmon aquaculture – primary among them, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) – operate as “captured regulators”, beholden to the industry they are supposed to oversee or at minimum deeply compromised by conflicts of interest. A neoliberal “principles-based” approach to enforcement in practice devolves to self-regulation – effectively no regulation – in the face of corporate economic power. DFO has consistently failed to enforce the provisions of the Fisheries Act that prohibit destruction to fish habitat and pollution of water frequented by fish against salmon farms. In fact, the agency historically has been charged with the direct promotion of salmon aquaculture, something that stands in direct contradiction to its primary mandate to protect wild fish stocks. DFO has unswervingly resolved this conflict in favour of the former, promoting and directly and indirectly subsidizing the industry while actively working to undermine independent efforts to hold it to account. Regulatory “failure” here functions to justify business-as-usual and the divine right of capital to operate and expand as it sees fit. The failure of DFO to undertake the monitoring and research necessary to demonstrate harm (or to demand an unmeetable linear and efficient causal proof of harm in a hyper-complex, stochastic ecological system) – and the undermining of independent efforts to do so – becomes the self-fulfilling justification for not taking further action and holding the industry to account, a Catch 22 that provides a perpetual green light to the salmon farming industry and its destructive practices.[1]
The regulatory genuflecting before the “common sense” reality of corporate power means that commercial proprietary rights consistently trump the public’s right-to-know and to a healthy environment. For instance, when asked to confirm the number of fish killed by the Clayoquot algal blooms under consideration here, Cermaq refused to release the figures for “commercial reasons.” Taken in a neoliberal regulatory context in which the primary responsibility for diagnoses and treatment lies with industry and in which it – and government – actively shield information about such efforts from public scrutiny, farms become near black boxes, effectively isolated from meaningful public oversight.
Opposition, however, is on-going, and takes many forms. Whereas DFO and the regulatory system more generally marginalizes their ecological knowledge and lived experience with fish farms, as with other forms of industrial and resource activity, Indigenous people have long been on the front-lines of direct resistance. This has included physical occupation of fish farms, one example being the occupation of a Cermaq fish farm by members of the Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw. Citing the presence of salmon farms as a continuation of genocidal practices visited upon First Nations, they served the farm with a 72-hour eviction notice. Cermaq responded with a trespass lawsuit, which the corporation subsequently dropped. An occupation in 2017 by the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis, ‘Namgis and Mamalilikulla First Nations of the Marine Harvest (now Mowi) farms at Midsummer Island and Swanson Island endured for many months. Whereas Marine Harvest obtained an injunction ordering them to leave, the protestors’ efforts spurred the initiation of consultations with the provincial government. Subsequent negotiations between First Nations, the provincial government and industry saw an agreement to remove multiple salmon farms from the Broughton Archipelago reached, though production will be transferred to other farms ostensibly outside the migratory route of wild salmon. The Musgamakw Dzawada'enuxw Tribal Council voted against the agreement, however, after the province extended several tenures within the Nation’s territory for an additional five years. In January 2019, the Dzawada’enuxw First Nation filed a lawsuit against Canada arguing that the federal government licensed ten salmon farms in their waters without their consent. The suit asserts Dzawada'enuxw title to their land, on the basis of which the farms’ presence constitutes an illegal occupation. The Dzawada'enuxw claim the farms pollution and poisoning of wild salmon “harm their waters and profoundly impact wild salmon populations, sea life, animal life, and the Dzawada'enuxw Nation community's way of life,” in violation of the Nation’s Aboriginal rights as protected by s. 35 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Nation’s Aboriginal title to the land.[2] The Nation had already sought an injunction to prevent the renewal of some of the site licenses by the province.
Resistance to the scourge of salmon aquaculture has been long-standing and remains strong. Materially and ideological, oppositional forces have irrupted to subvert and resist the dominant agenda. Such epistemic openings point the way to a more genuinely participatory and democratic decision-making process and economic democracy – one fundamentally connected to the process of reconciliation with Indigenous people, rooted in the movement to an unfolding ecological justice.
Tell Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to honour the Liberal campaign promise to remove salmon farms from B.C. waters by 2025:
https://salmonpeople.ca/remove-all-fish-farms
[1] When harm is considered, it is through a system of formal “risk assessment.” Yet, paradoxically, once so “quantified” risk loses its power to preclude. Risk becomes an affirmatory biopolitical force that facilitates the continued reproduction and expansion of the industry, a process is facilitated through a rhetoric of sustainable development through which normative processes of stakeholder inclusion in practice work to increase the power of industry.
[2] At a press conference announcing the lawsuit, Faron Soukochoff, elected chair of the Dzawada'enuxw First Nation proclaimed:
Our salmon stocks continue to decline rapidly and soon I fear the very possibility that our salmon will be no more. It is a keystone species and its decline impacts us on so many levels…. Everything in existence has a perfect balance, a symmetry….Casting aside all that we hold dear in the pursuit of the almighty dollar throws off that balance, bringing chaos to order. I was raised on the land and water and taught to respect all of the creator’s creation — the animals, the sea, the land, Mother Earth, and I will teach my sons and my grandchildren the same teachings, to show them that perfect balance, the symmetry, and why we must do all we can to take care of what has been bestowed on us as First Nations people, as human beings.
