While a new fact booklet from the industry – with forewords by both FAO and WWF – claims that aquaculture will “feed the world” by 2050, a giant global campaign against “Big aquaculture” has been launched which compares the harms of salmon farming to those of smoking.
Issuing a report later this month headlined “Smoke on the Water, Cancer on the Coast”, the brand-new Global Alliance Against Industrial Aquaculture (GAAIA) starts out warning consumers about the dangers of salmon farming, but will later move on to cover shrimp, tuna and genetically engineered (GE) fish.
GAAIA’s “Salmon Farming Kills” campaign uses similar graphic imagery to the “Smoking Kills” campaigns employed against Big Tobacco.
“As good global citizens we need to face the fact that salmon farming seriously damages human health, the health of our global ocean and the health of wild fish”, said Don Staniford, a global coordinator for GAAIA. “Salmon farming kills around the world and should carry a global health warning.”
Kurt Oddekalv, leader of Green Warriors of Norway, a splinter group from the Norwegian Association for Nature Conservation and a partner in GAAIA, claimed that “here in Norway the industry is on death row with infectious diseases, sea lice infestations, chemical resistance, escapes and depleted fish feed issues looming as the last nails in the coffin”.
Juan Carlos Cardenas, a veterinary doctor and director of Chile’s Centro Ecoceanos, added that in the last three years 20,000 jobs have been lost in the south coastal region in the wake of a “sanitary, environmental and social crisis” caused by Norwegian aquaculture firms operating there.
Meanwhile, food giant Nutreco published a booklet staking out the future for what they see as an aquaculture industry capable of making a significant contribution to feeding the world population in 2050 while still being sustainable.
The booklet features introductory texts from FAO and WWF, which lead on to sections on the challenges, the potential role and the opportunities for aquaculture as a provider of protein for the population of the earth in 40 years time.
“We addressed the challenge for agriculture in our 2010 Feeding the Future booklet. Aquaculture has an equivalent challenge; contributing to the doubling of food production while halving the footprint”, said Nutreco chief executive Wout Dekker.
“Seafood is widely appreciated as tasty and excellent nutrition. However, the ocean fisheries cannot increase yields without destroying the fish stocks on which they depend. Aquaculture must bridge the gap between fisheries and global demand”.