Danger - Farmed Salmon

February 10, 2005
By Joan Carter

More Articles By Joan Carter

Doctors are recommending that we eat more salmon - good for your heart, your cholesterol and your waistline. You want to do the right thing, so you figure you will pick up a nice salmon steak at the market. With concerns about the wild fish population, it's only natural that you would think the farmed salmon would provide one answer. WRONG! Farmed salmon may be one of the greatest dangers to our wild fish.

If you don't see the word "wild" at the market or on the menu, you are most likely eating a farmed salmon product. Farmed salmon are raised in floating pens or feedlots in Chile, Canada, Europe, and the United States. This spells trouble for you, for wild salmon, and for the oceans.

The market salmon seems like a bargain, but the price you pay with your health and the health of the entire ocean populations is priceless. Some of the extra things you get with your farmed salmon dinner include loss of flavor, dye, and toxins. Wild salmon get their beautiful color and fantastic taste from the prey they eat. Farmed salmon are fed pellets with growth hormones and who knows what else. The regulations for fish farming are arbitrary at best. The meat of farmed salmon would be grey without the addition of added pigment. Also, the fishmeal and fish oil fed to farmed salmon are more concentrated with dioxins than any other livestock feed, according to the European Union. As a result, an analysis of British Columbian salmon found that farmed salmon was nearly ten times higher in PCB levels than the wild variety.

If that wasn't bad enough, the farmed salmon present a real threat to the ocean salmon and all the other species of fish. Salmon farms infect wild fish with parasites and diseases, and compete for precious habitat when farmed fish escape their pens. In British Columbia, at least three rivers have now been populated by escaped Atlantic salmon, an invader to our Pacific waters that competes with native fish. Diseases and infestations can spread rapidly in crowded pens where salmon are raised. Fish farmers dose their fish to combat these outbreaks, using seven tons of antibiotics in British Columbia in 1998 alone. The 2002 collapse of the pink salmon run on the central British Columbia coast is blamed on parasites contracted from the area's numerous salmon farms. In Norway, the government has resorted to the deliberate poisoning of whole rivers to wipe out the spread of a parasite from a farming hatchery.

And what about POOP! Farmed salmon are raised in open cages, thousands of them in a net-pen the size of a small house. Usually, a dozen or so of these pens are tethered together. The fish pass their feces right into the waters around them, contaminating the water with as much raw sewage as a town of 65,000 people. Salmon waste overloads the water with nutrients. the result is a no-oxygen "dead zone" that can extend up to 500 feet.

And what about the economic ramifications Just four companies produce more than half of the farmed salmon sold in Northern America. By flooding the market with their product, they have put harvesters of wild fish, and the communities that depend on them, in an economic squeeze. Salmon farming expanded from just 10% of global salmon production in 1986 to 58% in 2001 - much faster than our understanding of it's impacts.

So what can we do -

Just ask - "Is it wild?" - is one simple answer. At the restaurant or the market, ask if the salmon is wild. If it's Atlantic, odds are that it's farmed. You can be sure if you buy direct from West Coast fishermen by using a website such as www.SalmonNation.com.

Call for mandatory labeling of farmed and wild salmon - email your comments to William Sessions, USDA Associate Deputy Administrator, at william.sessions@usda.gov.

To get salmon farming out of the oceans, visit the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform online at www.FarmedAndDangerous.org to send a message to key industry representatives.

Remember - Real Salmon jump waterfalls!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!