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The following transcript is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. Link to Audio and Episode Info Here
Show Transcript Deconstructing
Dinner Kootenay Co-op
Radio CJLY Nelson, BC,
Canada
July 16, 2009 Title: "Norway
British Columbia V ("Organic" Salmon?) Producer/Host - Jon Steinman Transcript - Angela Moore Jon Steinman: And welcome to
the 142nd episode of Deconstructing Dinner, produced at Kootenay
Co-op Radio CJLY in Nelson, British Columbia, I'm Jon Steinman. As promised, for the first half of today's episode we'll continue
with our ongoing Norway, British Columbia series - a series that is looking
deep into the controversial salmon farming industry off the western coast of
Canada. While the vast majority of the product is shipped into the United
States, the known and unknown impacts of these farms on the Canadian
marine ecosystem have attracted many concerned conservation groups to
place this industry clearly on their radar. On this part 5 of the series, we speak with The Living Oceans Society's
Shauna MacKinnon - a Markets Campaigner for the organization based in Vancouver
who has been closely monitoring the emergence of "organic" salmon - a
rather perplexing concept that we'll learn more about on today's broadcast. Increase Music and Fade Out
The presence of open net-cage salmon farms is an ongoing and contentious
debate not only off the coast of British Columbia but around the world where
such farms exist. Norway, Chile, Scotland and Canada are some of the most
notable locations for these controversial operations. And by all accounts these farms are industrial factory farms with many of
the sites in Canada being home to half a million fish in a surface area no
larger than a football field. The farms interact directly with the marine
environment raising concerns over their concentrated accumulations of waste,
disease and parasite transfer between the cultured and wild fish, animal
welfare concerns, and the list goes on. And so when salmon eaters around the world are slowly being introduced to
salmon labeled as organic, we certainly need to inquire into what exactly
that means. Salmon after all are most commonly recognized as a wild food.,.
and is wild food not as organic as any? Sharing her thoughts on the subject with Deconstructing Dinner is Shauna
MacKinnon - a Markets Campaigner with The Living Oceans Society - Canada's
largest organization focusing exclusively on marine conservation issues. Based
in Sointula, a small fishing village on the Central Coast of British Columbia,
the Society was started in 1998 and has long been a vocal critic of open-net
cage salmon farms. Shauna spoke to us from Vancouver Shauna
MacKinnon: Well when you see an organic labeled salmon in the grocery store in the
US or in Canada, you're not actually seeing a product that's been certified to
North American organic standards. Right now the only organic certification for
salmon is actually from European certifiers but in fact the rules around
organic certification in Europe allow for the use of antibiotics and pesticides
to treat livestock so salmon is no exception. Most of the organic famed salmon products that you see in the shelves
these fish are grown in net cages because the same way the industry in BC is
growing them. And because they are grown in net cages they are exposed to
disease and parasites and these continue to be persistent problems on the farms
so the animals, if they do become infected with sea lice or with any type of
disease, these organic farms are still able to treat them with the same
chemicals that are used in the production, in regular conventional production
here. So when you see an organic farmed salmon product your not actually seeing
a product that's much different than the run of the mill, industrial,
conventional farmed salmon that are causing problems in our own backyard. So
that is something that is a surprise to many consumers also many of the
businesses that are selling the product are selling it because they think its
better but it's really just not the case. JS: With no certified
organic salmon being produced in North America, Shauna shares how prevalent
organic labeled salmon is on grocery store shelves and restaurant menus. SM: It definitely
is out there. It's hard to track what the prevalence is because it isn't
tracked by import or expert statistics. I definitely know that its being sold
in a lot of specialty fish shops and many restaurants are also starting to use
it in their supplies as well. Probably not so much on the west coast and the
Pacific northwest but definitely it's being used in California and Ontario. So
it's quite prevalent. JS: In British
Columbia where controversy within the salmon farm sector has been
widespread, an association of industry groups has been working diligently to
create a certified organic standard for farmed salmon. Throughout the 8
years of those efforts the Living Oceans Society has been actively involved. SM: There are not
standards for organic aquiculture in North America yet but there has been a
push to develop them. In British Columbia the push for organic certification of
salmon has really been an eight year ongoing push from industry players to get
organic certification and its been unsuccessful in BC. Up until this year when the national program for organics will be put
into place, organic certification has been regulated at the provincial level.
So BC salmon farmers were attempting to get organic standards for salmon but
they had to work through the provincial organic standards body. And they opened
up the question to a lot of public input, a lot of scientific input, and after
a protracted debate that has taken place over 8 years they still were not
successful in coming to a set of standards that everyone could feel comfortable
with passing. And what it had taken was for the board members to agree that
these standards were strong enough, that they wouldn't be negatively impacting the
broader standards so it was really important for them to make sure that any
organic aquaculture standards would be on the same level of certified organic
livestock standards for terrestrial production. So that has been a debate that
living oceans society have been involved in. JS: The Certified
Organic Associations of BC the COABC is no longer involved in determining
whether a standard for farmed salmon should exist, and Shauna further explains
why and who is now involved in moving these efforts forward. SM: Well what
actually happened was the BC certifying organic body, the board members decided
about a year or two ago that they didn't want to go any further in this process
that they had spent so much time discussing this and were not able to come to
an adequate set of standards but they decided to stop working on it and at that
point the BC Ministry of Agriculture and Lands which is also responsible for
promoting aquaculture, decided to get involved and they tried to keep on with
this push. They were also unsuccessful in completing that. So now it will have
to go through a national process similar to what the national organic standards
for food and crop production had to go through that but the agency ,the
government agency, that's now pushing for the standards is actually the
Department of Fisheries and Oceans and they've been working with industry and
actually supporting, financially, the development of industry standards, which
will then go to the national standard setting process. JS: The Living Oceans
Society has also been involved in the United States, submitting their comments
on the development of an organic standard for farmed salmon underway there. In
November 2008, Shauna co-authored a letter to the National Organic Standards
Board in the US sharing their concerns. SM: We've also been
involved in the US, the national organic standards board in the US has been
working on organic aquiculture standards and they're actually further along
than we are in Canada. They have a draft set of standards that the board
members have put forward but in those standards, clearly stated and clearly
designed the standards to ensure that net caged salmon production, like what we
have here in the Pacific Northwest that's causing so much harm to wild salmon,
cannot be certified as organic. We have worked with our allies in the US as
well and helping to get more public involvement from Canada and the US in
putting information to that process to make sure that a high bar of standards
was put in place. JS: Back here in Canada,
and as introduced earlier, for about a year now the Federal Department of
Fisheries and Oceans (The DFO) has been working with industry to assist
them in moving towards the creation of a national standard, however, the DFO is
not the body that would set the standard, that would instead end
up in the hands of the Canadian General Standards Board, and so it remains to
be seen whether the Standards Board will too encounter the challenges faced by
British Columbia's certifying body - the COABC. We asked Shauna what the
primary challenges were for the COABC that led them to give up on
the decision-making process. SM: There
definitely were a few issues and the same type of issues that have come up in
the US as well. One of the issues is the fact that wild salmon are a migratory
species. The average salmon travels over 1000 kilometers in its lifetime so
confining that type of migratory species to a small pen, it's really difficult
to make the argument that its being raised in a way that's natural to its behavior.
So that was a really huge stumbling point for the COABC. In the US the
national organic standards board was not so concerned with that but their
concerns focused more heavily on the impact to wild salmon from sea lice and
prevent the spread of disease and just the inability of net cages to control
disease and prevent the spread to wild fish. The other element that has been a
huge issue is the use of wild fish in feed. While this is quite a confusing
point for consumers and for the public wild fish cannot be considered as
organic because they are free ranging and you can't control the diet that they
are eating so organic standards are all about being able to control the inputs
and outputs of the production system. So wild fish themselves could never be
considered organic but then that raises the question of how do you consider a
farmed fish that's eating wild fish as a main part of its diet to be organic so
that was a big stumbling block in BC. JS: This is Deconstructing Dinner and part five of our Norway British
Columbia series - a series exploring the controversial salmon farming industry
of the western coast of Canada. We're hearing from Shauna MacKinnon - a markets campaigner with the
Living Oceans Society - a vocal critic of the sector. Shauna has introduced a number of concerns as to why the Society
believes the public should be weary of salmon labeled as organic and why
certifying bodies have found it so difficult to agree upon standards for a
certified organic sector that is trying to develop itself here in North
America. Certainly the feed fed to the farmed salmon is a critical piece of
this organic salmon equation, and Shauna expands on the notion of feeding wild
fish to farmed salmon and then calling it organic. SM: The use of forage fish and the need to have more wild fish being eaten by
farmed salmon or other types of farmed fish that are a high trophic level than
you can actually produce is a huge cause of concern because from a
sustainability perspective if you have a type of production that's actually
using more protein than it's producing its very difficult to argue that that
could be sustainable or something that is not causing an environmental impact
which is one of the main goals of organic production. So that is a definite issue
that cannot be addressed by current production standards. So in the US the
standards that they decided to go with demand at least a 1:1, fish in fish out,
standard so that's something that the Living Oceans society supports as a
baseline and if farmed salmon is to be included in any type of Canadian
standard, then they would not be able to meet that at the moment so we would
hope that would be a baseline bar for what we talk about as sustainable or
organic aquaculture. JS: Perhaps the
most well known of concerns facing the industry as a whole are sea lice and the
unnatural incubation of this parasite on the farms and the risks that
they pose to wild juvenile salmon passing by the farms. We asked Shauna
MacKinnon if sea lice risks to the passing wild salmon would be any different
in a proposed organic system. SM: For the purposed standards in the US, one of the restrictions that they put
was net cages could not be used in areas where there could be impacts on wild
fish migration or reproduction. So in an area like BC where we have a
significant body of scientific evidence showing that there are impacts from
these farms on wild fish, this would be an area where they would not be able to
operate. In Canada I would hope that we would have the same type of standards
but my concern is that because the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who as
part of their portfolio, is to be protecting wild fish but they are also
actively promoting aquaculture. The fact that they are financing industry to
develop these standards, the concern is that they would obviously want to
operate on both coasts where we have information that sea lice from these
salmon farms are impacting wild fish. JS: Now one of the group's making themselves heard and encouraging
the emergence of certified organic salmon is the BC Salmon Farmers Association
(the BCSFA)- the trade group representing British Columbia's salmon farming
industry. In late 2008, the BCSFA published a comment on their web site in support
of creating a standard for organic salmon. The commentary sought to compare the
existence of organic standards on-land to those that they would like to see exist
in the marine environment. One paragraph in particular reads this, "Land
farms are open to the environment, wild animals, animal and airborne pests and
diseases, in exactly the same way as aquatic farms. The risk of disease
and parasite transfer is real in both cases. Whether this risk can be managed
in a manner conducive to organic certification on ocean farms should be judged
in accordance with the impact of land-based farms on terrestrial wildlife" The Living Oceans Society's Shauna Mackinnon responds SM: This quote
really I think is a falsehood that the salmon farming association has
definitely tried to perpetuate this myth that there's no difference farming in
water than farming on land. But it's absolutely a completely different
situation. Just take one example with sea lice - the impact of sea lice in a
net caged farm from one farm, and the amount of sea lice that's produced on that
farm because the farmed salmon are in close proximity to each other, sea lice
numbers breed very quickly, and even with a fairly low level of sea lice per
farmed fish, when you have 500,000 salmon in a farm that quickly becomes a huge
number of sea lice and we've seen through scientific research that the impact
of that farm, the sea lice clouds so to speak is up to 70 kilometers away so
the impact of each one of those farms, or the footprint of each one of those
farms is huge and is impacting wild fish for many, many kilometers and on land
we just don't have the same type of dynamic of having farmed and wild species
of the same type in close proximity transferring disease and parasites and if
you look at the bio-security measures that are demanded of on-land intensive
livestock operations those are just not at all, not even close to what's being
followed in the water for these net caged farms. So it's no surprise really
that we do have these massive problems with net caged farmed salmon because
there is no bio-security measure to separate or control disease and parasites
passing between the wild and farmed, so the Salmon Farmers Association and this
assertion that it is the same is just a falsehood. To try and make this
comparison between well there could be organic or better management using a net
caged system its untrue because organic management really depends on being able
to have control what's being inputted and outputted from a farm system and
without that control it can't work. JS: Shauna
MacKinnon. As mentioned earlier, the efforts to introduce an organic standard for
farmed salmon in Canada has been led by industry players. Certainly the BC
Salmon Farmers Association is one of those players, but the most active though
is a group calling itself the Pacific Organic Seafood Association (POSA). One
of the Association's founding members and the only producing any notable
production of finished product, is Creative Salmon, located off the Western
Coast of Vancouver Island near the community of Tofino. Creative Salmon happens
to be one of only a few Canadian-owned companies. Another very active
member of the Association is Taplow Feeds. Shauna Mackinnon shares her thoughts on the activities of POSA. SM: Well POSA is
the Pacific Organic Seafood Association, they're based here in BC, and it's a
number of industry groups that are interested in organic certification so these
businesses would like to see organic certification for the products so that
they can receive a premium for their products. From our perspective, their
motivations are quite clear for why they would like to see organic
certification. They feel like if they do things a little bit differently they
can have this organic brand which would be very powerful for them in the
marketplace. JS: Now
Canadian-owned Creative Salmon has for a number of years been seeking to
operate their farm sites following the organic standards that POSA is proposing
become the certified standards. For Creative Salmon however, this has
not been an easy process. To learn more about the company's efforts
Deconstructing Dinner had scheduled an interview with Creative Salmon
but their General Manager cancelled the interview the day before the scheduled
time. No reason was given as to why. But there's quite a lot of information about Creative Salmon out there...
The company has been in the middle of a number of incidents that don't
seem to bode well for their organic intentions, and certainly would not
be of help to any salmon farm business regardless of the label on the final
product. In 2000, as an example, a mass grave of more than 15 sea lions was found
in Tofino Inlet. The sea lions were confirmed to have been shot by employees at
the Creative Salmon farms. Fish farms often obtain a license to dispatch marine
mammals that threaten the fish in their net-pens. Creative has been cited numerous times for non-compliance with
regulations. In 2003, the BC Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection cited
Creative Salmon with non-compliance violations at 3 of its 4 active farms in
Clayoquot Sound. The infractions included disposal of net waste, fuel storage
and containment, and site registration. And also in 2003, BC Ministry of
Agriculture, Food and Fisheries cited Creative with non-compliance violations
of site configuration and/or biomass at three of its farms. In 2002, the same
government agency reported 9 cases of non-compliance at Creative's farms,
including a failure to report escapes at its Eagle Bay site. In 2005, fish from Creative Salmon's sites tested positive for the
presence of Malachite Green - a known carcinogen that can be used as a
fungicide in the raising of farmed salmon. With malachite green not
being permitted for food production in Canada, the incident did not go
unnoticed by the public and conservation groups. The company maintained that
they had never used the product and the issue has since passed. But then
in late 2007, the United States Food & Drug Administration - the FDA ,
performed a random test of Creative Salmon's fish as they passed across the border
and those too tested positive for traces of malachite green. The company
continued to maintain that they had never used malachite green. Creative Salmon has also been involved in a lengthy and ongoing
legal battle after taking a well-known opponent of open-net cage salmon farms
to court in a defamation suit. Challenges continued into the first months of 2007 when 110 sea
lions died at Creative's salmon farms, including 51 California sea lions found
entangled in the nets and drowned at one of their farm sites in Tofino Inlet.
Also in 2008, the company found trace levels of the antibiotic
florfenicol in their fish - which, under normal organic food standards would
not be permitted. and perhaps it was these, among other concerns, that led the General
Manager of Creative Salmon Spencer Evans - to leave the company in 2008. One of
the most telling comments we came across made by Evans was in an
interview for the magazine BC Business in which he declared that the goal to achieve
organic status is "toast". Evans believes that conservation groups have forced
the proposed standards to be so high, that open-net cage salmon farms would not
be able to attain such standards. Creative Salmon nevertheless continues to
promote itself as working to become certified organic. Here again is the Living Oceans Society's Shauna Mackinnon, sharing her
thoughts on Creative Salmon and some of the other players either seeking
to produce certified organic salmon or who already are. SM: Creative Salmon, one way that they do differ from the other companies
operating in BC is that they are producing chinook salmon, so it is a pacific
salmon species. The benefits of this is they seem to be more resistant to sea
lice infection which would be a positive but in fact Creative Salmon has been
doing monitoring on their farms for sea lice but they have not shared that data
publically and they're also operating in the Tofino Biosphere Reserve so the
biosphere reserve committee has actually been requesting to have this sea lice
data but they've been unwilling to share it. This gives an example of the
resistance to public scrutiny of the farms and to sharing with their neighbors
and other people who have a vested interest in production of the local area.
For other companies involved, Yellow Island Aquaculture is also a member of
POSA and they really are a very very tiny operation that is just sort of
experimenting with ways of producing salmon and are not a major producer and I
think they got involved with the idea of this promotion of organics as a way of
trying to find maybe a better way of producing this product but I don't know
that they're actually actively pursuing this anymore and I really think that at
this point it's Creative Salmon and Taplow Foods but I think also even though
POSA has been the main champion of organics so far in BC, the biggest producer
in BC, which is Marine Harvest, they have organic certified farms in Ireland
which are basically using exactly the same kind of production that they are
using in BC so one of the concerns is that with organic certified standards if
the bar is set low then all of the production here could go for organic
certification. JS: This is
Deconstructing Dinner Now the Pacific Organic Seafood Association drafted a set of standards in
2004 that they have posted on their web site. POSA did not respond to our email
invitation to appear on the show, and no phone number is listed on the site. But of interest in their standards is the section on Animal Welfare,
which would require a certified organic salmon farm to "meet the salmon's
physiological and behavioural needs" Now with salmon (as mentioned earlier) being a nomadic species that
travel thousands of miles as part of their annual migration, it really doesn't
appear that any salmon farmer would ever be able to come close to
being certified organic so long as the fish are in cages. And perhaps the objectives of this push to create organic standards are
made even more questionable upon coming across a section of Creative
Salmon's web site under the heading "organic". The page summarizes some of
the ways that the company operates using what they call organic
principles, with one heading reading, "animal welfare". Listed there are the
Five Freedoms... a standard for animal welfare that has existed for decades and
is used around the world as a benchmark. The five freedoms consist of Freedom
from thirst and hunger, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain, injury and
disease, freedom from fear and distress and freedom to express normal
behaviour. Yet upon closer look at Creative Salmon's list of five
freedoms, it appears that the company has conveniently changed one of
the freedoms to suit their own needs... Instead of "freedom to express
normal behaviour"... Creative Salmon has changed it to read, "Freedom from unnecessary
restriction on behaviour". Seemingly a way for the company to argue that
keeping salmon in cages is "necessary". soundbite Another questionable standard proposed on the POSA web site are "social
objectives" - under which reads... "The encouragement of the use of local
resources and services". The Living Oceans Society's Shauna Mackinnon responds to this objective SM: The one thing that's very interesting about that objective is that in
Canada it's actually not legal to use forage fish as feed for farmed fish so
one of the products that's being used in farmed salmon feed is herring and
herring is caught for roe in BC and so that's just for the eggs and then the
rest of the herring, the entire fish, is considered a waste by-product so they
are able to incorporate that into feed. But the reason why we have this
regulation in Canada is to prevent the fishing of one type of fish to be feed
to a higher trophic one which is not as an efficient of a use as wild fish so
its quite funny actually that they would include this as an objective to use
local resources but one of the local resources that they are using, they are
actually using it in a way that is counter to the regulations that exist, and really
in general, if you're looking at an organic farm system, what you're ultimately
looking for is a system that can use as many things on site within the farm
system and reducing the amount of off-farm inputs that you need to bring in and
wild fish are ultimate users of local resources - they do all the work for you.
So one might ask the question why would you be trying to raise a farmed fish in
a way which could never by more efficient than what wild fish are doing. There
is definitely a role for sustainable aquaculture in meeting our food needs but
when it comes to farming wild salmon I think wild salmon has it beat. JS: And that was
Shauna MacKinnon - a markets campaigner working with the Living Oceans Society
in Vancouver. In closing out this part five of our Norway, British Columbia
series here on Deconstructing Dinner, we'll leave you with some final thoughts
from Shauna before we move into the second half of today's show and part six of
our ongoing series on co-operatives as an alternative to our industrial food
system. SM: As I mentioned
earlier, Fisheries and Oceans Canada
is now helping to issue organic standards for aquaculture that would be taken
national and this is a new development, they're actually still doing this
behind closed doors and very soon it will have to become a public process and
so I would encourage everybody that cares about organic food and the sustainability
of both our land-based ecosystems and our marine ecosystems to actively get
involved when that becomes a public process. Because it's very important not
just for protecting wild salmon but also for protecting the integrity of the
organic food system and what organic farmers in Canada have been working for
decades to build. So you can keep following this issue on the
livingoceanssociety.org website or also the farmedendangerous.org, which is the
website of the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform. soundbite JS: And this is
Deconstructing Dinner - a syndicated weekly one-hour radio show and Podcast
produced at Nelson British Columbia's Kootenay Co-op Radio. I'm Jon Steinman.
Today's broadcast is, as usual, archived on our web site at deconstructingdinner.ca Show continues with half-hour segment on the Park Slope Food Co-op
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