Adding insult to injury – Canada won 8-0 – North American environmentalists staged a protest demonstration outside the Olympic Canada-Norway hockey game – against Norwegian aquaculture.
Aiming their protest primarily against the Oslo-based Marine Harvest, the world’s dominant salmon farming company, the activist claimed the industry practice to be “tremendously destructive” to the environment. The main points in the environmentalists’ – and many scientists’ – criticism is that feed, waste and pesticides from the fish farms’ net pens pollute main water bodies, and that escaped fish may contaminate wild fish stocks.
In the wake of increased health-consciousness among American consumers, not the least new awareness of the heart-friendly effects of Omega-3 oils, salmon has become the third most popular fish in the USA, overtaking fish fingers in 2000. Two thirds of all farmed salmon consumed there is imported, Norway, Chile and Canada dominating global production.
The protesters outside the venue in Vancouver, led by a group called the Pure Salmon Campaign, called on Norway’s King Harald V to urge Norwegian companies to move farms out of the path of migrating wild salmon and to employ technologies, such as closed containment systems, that would protect wild fish stocks.