A bit more Alphamax on your salmon, sir?

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A couple of my closer acquaintances work in the aquaculture business. That, and the fact that the aquaculture in this region employs at least 2000 or more people, makes me reluctant to cast a critical eye on the industry. Aquaculture is now principal contributor to the East Coast economy.

So how did this industry get here? There are two main factors: the decline of wild fin-fish stocks due to over fishing, and the potential for applying modern farming technology to ocean resources. Both of these conditions were, in large part, influenced by government involvement.

The Canadian government is directly responsible for monitoring the health coastal ocean resources and presided over the dramatic decline of the wild fishery. At the same time, government invested heavily in aquaculture science and development to lay the foundations for Canadian aquaculture. Arguably, both initiatives were fuelled by economic considerations over the environment. Without being overly cynical, voters with jobs vote, fish do not.

Today, Cooke Aquaculture, which bills itself as North America’s largest independent integrated aquaculture business, produces 115 million pounds of Atlantic Salmon a year and 35 million pounds of trout.

At $3 a pound, wholesale, that’s $450 million annually from its operations in New Brunswick, Maine, Newfoundland and Chile. And that doesn’t account for income from other sources, which include its fish nutrition and transportation business units.

There are problems running this kind of globalized business. In Chile, for example, an outbreak of infectious salmon anemia reduced Chilean salmon exports to just 20 percent of its former production in recent years.

So, when we start to question the use of pesticides to combat epidemics of sea lice—and protect millions of dollars of farmed salmon in cages—we’re also dealing with some much larger socio-economic issues, including impacts on national economies. It’s not as simple as “let’s just not use pesticides.”

Just how safe are these pesticides? Alphamax is based on deltamethrin, which is a replacement to DDT, and has been around in some form since the 1970s. It is a neurotoxin, and is not soluble in water, and is deadly to fish in high concentrations, and especially to crustaceans such as lobsters. It can also be hazardous to the humans who handle it. Deltamethrin is used on everything from pet parasites to bed bugs, and recent studies show that some parasites are quickly building up a genetic resistance to the chemical due to its over-use.

As far as I know, there are no long-term studies on the health risks of deltamethrin use on the environment. This reminds me a lot of old newsreel films showing German death camp survivors being generously dusted with DDT to kill lice—and the new evidence of DDT’s affect on the reproductive systems of polar bears. Fortunately, I guess, deltamethrin breaks down rather rapidly in the environment.

Still, we are playing God with our food supply. And what affect does that have on the actual quality of our food? Well, some. Farmed salmon, according to government information, don’t naturally produce much Omega 3, one of those essential fatty acids we humans require for brain development. Farmed salmon typically produce greater quantities of less desirable Omega 6, and have a higher level of body fat than do wild salmon. So, aqua-farmers add Omega 3 to the salmon food. Organic food websites also contend that farmed salmon lacks the flavour of wild salmon.

As salmon are carnivores, there is also food production efficiency issue. According to various sources, it takes between 2 and 4 kilograms of wild forage fish (such as anchovies) to produce one kilogram of salmon. Given that the wild fish stocks—that depend on these forage fish—are rapidly depleting worldwide this should be a serious international concern. But it isn’t. Because there is simply no existing, binding global governance to regulate industry—any industry. Though, to be fair, industry is trying to reduce the amount of forage fish products in its feed.

Here, on Passamaquoddy Bay, we are blessed with one of the most productive fisheries in the northern hemisphere thanks to the daily churning of the tides and nutrient-rich waters. Granted, the fin-fish fishery has declined. But our lobster and shellfish industries are thriving. The use of Alphamax, which drifts as solid particles on the tides, is a real risk to those industries, as both levels of governments already recognize in their strict restriction of Alphamax use.

So now we have a real dilemma. Salmon aquaculture, as it’s currently practiced, is not an environmentally sustainable industry, its critics contend. Yet we’ve invented this industry we can’t allow to fail—because we need the profits and the jobs. At the same time we have an ancient industry—fishing, that is rapidly disappearing due to intensive industrial practices.

Do I have any solutions? Not really. I buy farmed Atlantic salmon. Our family eats it once or twice a month. We like the taste and the price is reasonable. I support my friends who work in the aquaculture business. I support local jobs.

And yet, I can’t help thinking that all this wrong can’t possibly add up to a right. Do we really need another morally-conflicted multinational industry we can call our own?