New tough rules needed to make B.C.'s salmon farming less harmful
Editor's note: Western Canada Wilderness Committee believe that only self-contained salmon fish farm feedlots situated on dry land should be allowed.
The David Suzuki Foundation believes that the combination of public subsidies, human health issues, pollution, threats to native stocks from disease and habitat damage and other factors, show that the salmon netcage industry in B.C. is not sustainable.
The Foundation recommends these policy changes to make salmon farms less damaging to the environment.
- Replace open cages with totally closed containment systems.
- Eliminate discharge of fish sewage into the surrounding environment.
- Fully monitor drug use and spread of drug-resistant diseases.
- Require systematic testing by communities for diseases among farmed and wild fish, to be fully funded by industry.
- Institute mandatory insurance for operators to cover full ecological restoration costs of disease epidemics, escapes, genetic pollution and other catastrophic events.
- Require industry-developed and funded site reclamation plans
- Bring in a resource-use rent or royalty for salmon farmers.
- Introduce single-window access to public funds, which will be audited and made public.
- Develop and use a process for gaining the agreement of coastal communities and First Nations regarding the siting of all existing or proposed fish farms.
- Prohibit the use of firearms and acoustic deterrent devices that harass marine mammals, and require the use of technologies that safely separate local wildlife from salmon farming operations.
- Eliminate the use of fish that could be used as human food as the primary feed for farmed salmon.
