A week ago, on 4th February, the Stornoway Gazette announced that Marine Harvest Scotland, part of the world’s biggest aquaculture combine, had bought Western Isles based Lewis Salmon ‘as part of its ongoing expansion to meet global demand for farmed salmon’.
The paper quoted Alan Sutherland, Marine Harvest Scotland’s MD as saying that a major reason for the purchase was to maintain fish health - ‘We operate a very strict regime on our farms to avoid the risk of spreading infection or sea lice. For this to be effective, it’s best if we can manage all the farms within a particular loch. By purchasing Lewis Salmon we can grow the fish and fallow sites in a way which protects fish welfare and maintains the high quality of the salmon.’
This claim is at serious odds with the fact that the impact of disease in Marine Harvest’s Scottish salmon farms could be sharply seen in the 2012 financial performance of its Scottish subsidiary.
In 2011, its Scottish operation was highlighted as its best performing division, with high production volumes of over 60,000 tonnes.
In the last quarter of 2012, however, its Scottish production fell to only 7,000 tonnes – said to be due to ‘biological issues’. This underproduction and a drop in the price of farmed salmon saw the group’s profits in the last quarter of 2012 fall from an anticipated £18 million to £6.6 million. In the last quarter of 2011, the last quarter profits had been £44 million.
The unspecified ‘biological issues’ – code for ill health in fish – may well have been the Amoebic Gill Diseae that swept the farmed salmon industry in the last part of 2012.
Aquaculture remains a dirty industry and, in practice, is being regulated unchallengingly in order not to hinder its contribution to the Scottish economy.
It is quite possible for this industry to be clean but this wold mean the introduction of practices whose cost wold reduce profits. However, in the worldwide feeding frenzy for salmon products, there is plenty of margin in the profits to choose to produce them responsibly. That this is not being done is simply down greed, in shareholders unwilling to contemplate any reduction in dividends and in companies focused only on racking up as much profit as possible.
Worse, there is no pressure on the industry to be clean when the products arising from it are given the public stamp of approval of the RSPCA/Freedom Food label – for a monitoring regime no more demanding than that the industry adopts internally. This has to change.
