Mark Hume
February 5, 2012
Globe and Mail

A group of leading fisheries scientists have come up with a proposal to answer some of the most pressing and difficult environmental questions on the West Coast: Are fish farms killing wild salmon? And if so, how many?

Debate on the environmental impact of fish farms has raged in British Columbia for over a decade. Environmentalists blame aquaculture for causing a collapse in wild salmon populations by spreading sea lice and disease, but there has never been any hard scientific evidence to prove those claims.

Now David Welch, who has done groundbreaking work tracking fish at sea with acoustic transmitters, has put together a team of some of the brightest fisheries researchers in Canada to solve the mystery.

Dr. Welch testified last year to the Cohen Commission, explaining how his acoustical tracking work had shown that salmon smolts, in their first year at sea, were vanishing in Queen Charlotte Strait, just past the northern tip of Vancouver Island.

Because fish farms are clustered in a bottleneck in Discovery Passage on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, Dr. Welch’s research raised suspicions that wild salmon might be picking up diseases and/or lice as they migrated past the farms, then dying some weeks later in Queen Charlotte Sound.

In December, Dr. Welch filed a supplemental report with the Cohen Commission, saying a new analysis shows his data is even stronger than he first thought. So many fish died north of the farms, he stated, that it could explain the Fraser River’s catastrophic sockeye collapse in 2009, when only one million fish returned to spawn, instead of 10 million.

“This level of higher mortality would be sufficient to fully explain the 10-fold decline in Fraser sockeye survival seen since 1990,” states Dr. Welch.

He cautions that “this new result remains a correlation, not proof that the fish farms caused the reduced survival,” but he proposes a way to find out.

Read the full story in the Globe and Mail.

Margaret Munro
February 2, 2012
Vancouver Sun

Twenty years after the collapse of the world's largest cod fishery off Canada's East Coast, experts say the beleaguered groundfish are still being overexploited.

Fishing continues in areas where cod stocks are below "critical limits," says Jeffrey Hutchings of Dalhousie University and head of a national science panel that called Thursday for sweeping changes in the management of Canada's oceans.

The change needs to start at the top, by reducing the "czar-like" powers of the federal minister of fisheries and oceans, the panel says.

The Fisheries Act, which dates back to 1868, also needs to get with the modern age, says the expert panel on marine biodiversity, which was established by the Royal Society of Canada.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is responsible for both exploiting and conserving fisheries — a "conflict of interest" that the panel says needs to be resolved.

The 10-member panel spent two years assessing ocean biodiversity and the challenges posed by climate change, fishing and aquaculture.

It has delivered a 316-page report that says Canada's oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic, which could make some waters inhospitable to marine life. And sea ice disappearing from the Arctic and the East Coast will profoundly affect marine life and their ecosystems.

It says overfishing has seriously depleted many species and disrupted marine food webs.

Read the full story in the Vancouver Sun.

Read related stories:

• CBC News; February 2, 2012; "Canada failing its oceans, biodiversity panel finds"
  
• Vancouver Sun; February 2, 2012; "Canada must act decisively to protect marine biodiversity: report"
  

January 31, 2012
World Fishing & Aquaculture

The Norwegian Seafood Council has expressed its satisfaction with the US International Trade Commission’s decision to revoke the anti-dumping and countervailing duty orders against Norwegian Atlantic salmon.

NSC’s Director of Market Information, Egil Ove Sundheim, said, “It is gratifying to have these unnecessary trade barriers removed after more than 20 years. The Norwegian industry worked very hard to provide all of the information requested by the United States Government and we are very pleased that our information and arguments were fully considered.”

The US anti-dumping and countervailing duty orders against fresh and chilled Atlantic salmon from Norway covered whole fresh salmon, and were originally imposed in 1991. Removal of the prohibitive anti-dumping duty of nearly 24% is not considered a start of a significant increase in the exports of whole fresh and chilled salmon from Norway to the US.

Read full story on World Fishing & Aquaculture.

Read related stories:

• Fish News EU; January 30, 2012; "Anti-dumping reversal celebrated"
  
• Reuters; January 27, 2012; "Norway's salmon producers eye U.S. as tariff falls"
  

Ray Grigg
January 27, 2012
Courier Islander

The mystery of the disappearing wild salmon may be closer to being solved due to the reconvened Cohen Commission and the extraordinary three days of hearings held in December, 2011. As earlier testimony revealed, many environmental factors affect the survival of wild salmon.

Evidence now confirms that government policy supports the salmon farming industry, and that the industry has been willing to exploit this advantage to win regulatory concessions for its economic gain - in the words of one Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) official, the industry seemed "to dictate" policy. These concessions may have involved relaxed importation, inspection and quarantine of Atlantic salmon eggs, and inadequate supervision of fish health.

Summary statements written by Gregory McDade and Lisa Glowaki, two of the lawyers representing Dr. Alexandra Morton at the inquiry, describe how DFO failed to pursue evidence suggesting that ISAv might be in wild salmon, despite an independent 2004 test that suggested all Cultus Lake sockeye were infected. "Instead it buried the results completely for seven years," notes the summary, and "decided to not test any further wild salmon. This reaction is not consistent with the scientific method or a precautionary approach - rather it shows action of a political nature - denial and suppression of an inconvenient fact. In legal terms, it is known as willful blindness, also characterized in some circumstances as gross negligence." This opinion is reinforced by DFO's failure to submit any ISAv documentation to the Commission.

Read the full story in the Courier Islander. 

Read related stories. 

Agence France-Presse
January 26, 2012
Vancouver Sun

The worldwide fishing industry could benefit from an annual $50-billion boost if stocks were allowed time to recover, the UN said Wednesday.

Already 32 per cent of the world's fish stocks have been depleted by years of overfishing and poor coastal management, according to a UN Environment Program report released in the Philippine capital Manila.

"The potential economic gain from reducing fishing capacity to an optimal and restoring fish stocks is in the order of $50 billion per annum," a summary of the UN report said, with-out giving details on how the figure was reached.

The report said overfishing, pollution from land-based farming and industry, and the destruction of habitat, including coral reefs and man-groves, are all having an effect on fish stocks. This is directly affecting the 540 million people around the world who are dependent on the fishing industry, experts said.

Read the full storty in the Vancouver Sun.