Nonsense. Your using a Red Herring. My arguments against open net pen salmon farming of Atlantic salmon were directly against the introduction of an exotic species into BC waters and the direct discharge of effluent and other environmental outputs from the operation directly into the surrounding environment. It is the same argument I use against a city like Victoria discharging its sewage untreated into the Georgia Strait - no good can come of it, no matter have efficient and cheap it is. My arguments against the social paradigm was directed against the arguments FOR open net farming of Atlantic salmon in BC waters (the so-called economic benefits).
No, your argument was against feedlot rearing in general and a food system that will fly an orange halfway round the world and on those points I agree. However, such is the nature of the capitalist "free market" system and like it or not, that system exists and it does raise livestock on feedlots and that isn't going to change. We aren't going to become a society of vegetarians or eaters of locally grown tilapia; we (and I mean the generic we) are going to remain a society of consumers who demand that our wants be fulfilled. That system also requires that we have jobs and those jobs require producing salable products that satisfy those consumer wants in order that the wages and profits required to exist in that system can be earned.
Not true. However difficult it might be, a paradigm shift is not only possible...it is imperative.
Don't hold your breath. The world is currently being ripped apart by the efforts to expand the existing "free market" system that is the determinant of our social paradigm. Governments around the world are shifting rightward towards more complete adoption of it's principles; consumers everywhere trip over themselves to support the system that allows them access to unnecessary goods they believe "enhance" their lives. We are stuck with this system until it collapses of it's own weight and in order to be successful in the market, those goods that sell must be produced. That you don't like seapen salmon rearing is a given, but your arguments against it based on the social paradigm are entirely irrelevant.
Except that, while the economic outputs (as measured by GDP) of the Sports Sector are slightly less (and therefore less attractive to investors and tax collectors) the Sport Fishing sector employs more people (7,700 vs 2100 for aquculture, in 2005) and generates more revenues ($885 million vs $328 million for aquculture, in 2005) so it would seem to be more valuable as a producer of economic activity and jobs and would therefore, I would think, be more important to the average Joe. Also, because of the difficulty of assessing the economic value of service industries, I can't help but feel that the contributions of the Sports sector to GDP is under estimated, especially with its close ties to tourism (what is the fisherman's wife doing while he is out fishing all day?). If that is the case, I would think that an activity that might jeopardize that (such as a catastrophic decline in wild fish caused by disease spread from open net farms, however unlikely that might be) should be avoided. More should be done to protect, promote and expand the sport fishing and tourism industries, not promoting and expanding a less valuable industry that has the potential (however remote) to negatively affect the single largest industry (by employment) in the fisheries/aquaculture sector.
Get your numbers right. As I suggested in my previous post, the cumulative economic output of direct, indirect and induced benefits from salmon farming, a sum of $699 million, is approaching the cumulative total from those same sources for the combined output of the commercial salmon harvest, $366 million, and the sport salmon fishing sector, $419 million.
Full Time Equivalent cumulative employment for salmon farming is 2,900, the commercial salmon sector is 2,300 jobs and the sport salmon sector is 3400. All numbers for 2005; sourced from tables on page 2 of the last link in the list I posted previously. While employment in the sport salmon sector is roughly 15% greater, it is also seasonal rather than year round as in the salmon farming sector.
Economic output including multiplier effects for salmon farming is roughly 65% higher than for sport salmon. Regardless of your personal take on the accuracy of the measurement, the numbers are what they are.
But we have seen it. It is evident in the dramatic declines in stocks of wild salmon and steelhead since the 1990s. What we have not seen is the scientific proof that this dramatic decline in salmon and steelhead stocks was caused by the farms, which you need to see before you are willing to admit that farming exotic species in open net pens that discharge their environmental output directly into to the surrounding environments (often the very same environments that millions of young and maturing salmonids swim through to and from their natal streams) is probably not a good idea.
Industrial logging has had an enormous effect on fish stocks over the second half of the 1900s. It was a primary industrial driver for the province and it operated with a slash and burn mentality that shaved hillsides and watersheds and changed the nature of the rivers that drained them. The ability of the watershed to retain water and release it slowly to feed the streams was destroyed and along with it the habitat that allowed the salmon grounds to breed and the fry grounds to rear and it wasn't until 1993 and the Clayoquot protest that logging companies began to change their practices to reduce the destruction left in their wake. Many watersheds have still not recovered and many salmon runs were all but wiped out.
BC population has doubled since 1971 and that increased population has swallowed great tracts of land for roads, cities and housing, and resulted in the growth of business and industry to service and employ it. That population creates a waste stream composed of garbage, runoff and the effluent of industry that escapes to and pollutes streams and groundwater and uses land in such a way as to render innumerable small creeks and rivers unusable by the fish that had spawned there for generations.
Wild salmon stocks have always been under growing pressure by the commercial fleet since the sixties and by the late eighties, the fleet had reached a new apex in catching power. The fleet was now able to capture in hours what used to take months. The pressure was so intense that the government went into the business of making fish in hatcheries to supply the fleet and we underwent an extended period of genetic modification as hatchery selection changed the essential genetic nature of many runs by selecting for hatchery survival rather than wild survival. The government undertook a number of fleet reduction programs to reduce fleet catching power but every one resulted in a further technological surge that resulted in even greater catching power than had previously existed. Catching power and catches finally began to decline when the fleet ran out of fish. They began to increase once again as the fleet switched more of it's focus to the lowly pinks and chum and began to take steadily increasing catches of those species.
http://www.fish.bc.ca/files/EvolutionCommercialFisheries-BC_2004_0_Complete.pdfSport salmon catches were thought to be minor and were therefore poorly studied until the early eighties when DFO realized that the sports sector were taking over 30% of the coho and chinook catch coastwide and an even higher proportion in Georgia Strait. This set off a rush of statistics collection and caused conflicts over share allocation and the implementation of reduced limits over the next two decades to attempt to control and limit the harvest. As with the commercial fleet, the sport sector also set it's sights on the previously disdained pinks and chum as numbers of the high value species decreased.
http://www.fish.bc.ca/files/R-39_EvolutionSalmonFisheries.pdfThere are many potential causes for the declines in salmon stocks including those I've summarized and many more possibilities including climate change, North Pacific salmon ranching and possibly even a new endemic virus that the newly adopted darling of the reactionary campaign claims to have found. To ignore any or all of them and suggest that the blame must lie with salmon farms is to ignore the realities of the situation. It betrays a lack of understanding of the biological dynamic of salmon and a lack of objectivity in analyzing the problem. It is for that reason that i suggested you educate yourself in the biology of both the fish and the environment.
cont'd
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Topic: Lethal virus from European salmon found in wild BC salmon (Read 245599 times)