Thirty people or so pulled up chairs, squeezing around a table in a conference room at Nutreco’s facility in Stavanger, Norway. It was June 2004. Most people in the room were in town for AquaVision, Nutreco’s biennial aquaculture conference.
The people were academics, feed scientists, marine scientists, salmon farmers and environmentalists. Their common interest was farmed salmon and the environment, and their meeting would be among the first for the farmed salmon Aquaculture Dialogue, organized by World Wildlife Fund.
Earlier that year, farmed salmon’s image took a huge body blow when headlines blared that compared to wild salmon it contained higher amounts of PCBs, dioxins and other organochlorine contaminants, the conclusion of a study published in Science by Indiana University’s Ronald Hites and his colleagues. (What most of the newspaper articles didn’t say was that the study was funded by Pew Charitable Trusts.)
So, the tension in the room was pretty darn thick. Even so, it was a hopeful sight: Something good had to come of all these people sitting down at a table together to speak their minds, even though the road ahead would be a tough and tedious one.
Go ahead, call me a kumbaya-singing Polyanna, if you will. I won’t mind a bit.
I was hopeful then that something powerful and beneficial was underway. I still am.
The result would be rules defining a healthy, environmentally responsible farmed salmon operation. The payoff would be huge: the farmed salmon industry could fulfill its promise of providing healthy, affordable protein year-round, and good jobs in balance with the surrounding marine environment. And the market might just be spared the jolt of scary headlines.
The farmed salmon conversation continues, now led by a steering committee that includes people from the farmed salmon industry — Skretting, SalmonChile, Marine Harvest, the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance and the Norwegian Seafood Federation — and environmental NGOs and grant-makers — Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, Fundacion Terram, Pew Environmental Group and World Wildlife Fund.
They have already reached consensus on the main impacts of salmon farming:
• disruption of flora and fauna on the ocean bottom from excess nutrients from food and feces;
• use of chemicals that can harm the health of humans and marine organisms;
• potential transfer of viruses and parasites from farmed to wild fish;
• escaped fish that can compete with wild fish.
• reducing dependency on fishmeal and fish oil made from wild fish in the feed for farmed salmon.
• excess nutrients in the water from fish waste and feeds that can lead to algae growth that robs oxygen from the water and marine life.
• social issues surrounding labor practices and sharing the coastal environment with other people.
Reaching consensus on this list is pretty significant progress when you consider where all this was in 2004. Still, these are tough, tough issues to hash out.
The ongoing farmed salmon dialogue meets again in March in Puerto Varas, Chile. If it seems like these talks will never finish, look to the aquaculture dialogue over tilapia, which began in August 2005 and produced standards in December 2009.
When I talked to Aaron McNevin, coordinator of the dialogues for WWF, I asked — nicely — So, um, what took so long? Isn’t tilapia pretty benign?
Actually, he said, there were a lot of issues to hash out: escapes, converting wetlands to farms, wild fish in the feed. And these were issues common to all aquaculture.
“There’s no way around those things,” he said. “If you want to do this right and address the issues, we just had to meet these issues head on.”
So while the farmed salmon Aquaculture Dialogues got the ball rolling and blazed the trail that helped the tilapia dialogues get going, the tilapia group picked up that ball, reached the finish line first and along the way may have just worked out some of the toughest barriers to aquaculture operations of all types satisfying environmental NGO concerns.
Now, we’ll see how the market reacts to the availability of certification of tilapia farming to the Aquaculture Dialogues standards and the Global Aquaculture Alliance tilapia standards. There seems to be a fierce competition underway between the two certification regimes. Competition can be good and keep everybody on their toes, and certification overall is pushing progress.
But as this all plays out, hopefully no one will lose sight of the ultimate goal: responsible aquaculture. What decisions are you making today that in the long-term will benefit the marine environment and be economically viable?
To that end, we’ll be watching for a side-by-side analysis of the GAA and Aquaculture Dialogue tilapia standards from the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, an environmental NGO. The study is expected by the end of March.
Without healthy oceans, we’ll all be looking for work.
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