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Dear Editor,
Van Andruss ("Where have all the salmon gone?", Feb. 17) is right to point to open-net salmon farms as a major factor affecting salmon runs to the Fraser River. Declining wild salmon runs in B.C. mirror the devastation of wild stock in Norway, which is the world’s leading producer of farmed Atlantic salmon.
Norwegian companies, which own most of B.C.’s salmon farms, are profiting while people and ecosystems that rely on wild salmon pay the cost.
In Norway, sea lice infestations are now out of control because sea lice are developing resistance to the only chemicals that can control them.
The parasite surrounds fish farms in unnatural numbers, and then young salmon must migrate through infested waters. In some regions, there is up to 90 per cent mortality of wild salmon due to sea lice infection.
Biologist Alexandra Morton raised the alarm in B.C. years ago when she noticed that young pink salmon, which migrated past the fish farms in the Broughton Archipelago, were becoming so infested with sea lice that relatively few were surviving to spawn.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans would not listen to her concerns then, and then had to explain away the near collapse of the pink stocks in the area.
Thanks to Morton’s and others’ efforts, public awareness has increased and the government is being forced to pay attention: hence the Cohen inquiry.
Courts have also agreed with Morton and stated that salmon farms are a fishery, not an agriculture, and therefore must be controlled and regulated by the DFO.
Even Norway’s former attorney general, Georg Fredrik Rieber-Mohn, has sent a warning to Canada to act now or we will lose our wild salmon the way Norway has virtually lost its wild stocks.
He insists that if we are to continue to allow fish farming, then farms must be moved away from salmon migration routes.
The fight to save wild salmon is not over.
We need to keep the pressure on the government, on Fisheries Minister Gail Shea, and on the DFO to look honestly at the science and to stop looking for loopholes. Demand that they stop bowing to pressure from a harmful industry and ask them towork for the people and wildlife of Canada, not for Norwegian companies.
Thank you to the Lillooet News for keeping this issue on our minds.
Keri Whitehead
Seton Portage
