Pink Poison

(from Jersey Coast Anglers Association February 2003 Newsletter)

This Christmas the chances are you're going to be eating smoked salmon. Far from being a creature of the wild, your fish was probably grown in a tiny cage, swimming in its own sewage and pumped full of chemicals. It was also part of an industry that will almost certainly implode over the next few years

AS OUR boat approaches the circular cage in the middle of the serene loch, the water seems from a distance to be boiling.

Soon, the reason is clear. The surface is alive with thousands of young salmon swirling upwards to burst through the water in a seething mass of silver.

It is both a startling and distressing sight. For these fish will never follow their wild cousins on the epic 3,000-mile journey from Scotland to the Polar ice cap to be guided inexorably back to the rivers of their birth and to leap majestically upstream in one of nature's abiding miracles.

Instead, these salmon, 63,000 of them, will spend their lives crammed into a cone-shaped salt water pen measuring 72ft across and 50ft deep in an horrifically cramped existence akin to the joyless and unnatural lives of battery hens.

Even before being transferred from fresh water tanks to cages like these, the salmon are 'tricked' into maturing more quickly by the use of artificial lights to imitate the passing of the seasons.

Once in salt water, instead of spending several years at sea in the wild, captive fish like these will be rapidly fattened over the coming months in a space equivalent to as little as a bathtub of water per fish. During that time, they will swim in a soup of their own faeces, their fins often ragged and scarred from rubbing against the cage perimeter.

Across Scotland's salmon farms, the amount of raw, untreated sewage produced by the fish has been estimated to be almost twice the amount created, weight by weight, by humans.

Unsurprisingly, disease and parasites are common, though huge amounts of chemicals are poured in or fed to the fish to control their spread.

When the fish reach around 3kg, they will be ready for 'harvesting' - the industry euphemism for being stunned unconscious with a metal bolt, bled to death, then gutted and filleted, ready for the supermarket shelf, or perhaps an industrial smokery where they will be turned into one of the traditional Christmas delicacies.

By the time they reach your plate, the best testimony to their captive conditions will be the lines of white fat that marble their flesh, a cruel contrast to the lean, muscular flesh of wild salmon that is so highly-prized by fishermen and cooks.

The salmon farming industry has been growing at a phenomenal rate, from 800 tonnes of salmon produced in 1980 to an astonishing 160,000 tonnes last year - a 200-fold increase.

As a consequence, what was once a luxury item on British plates has become a staple food; a cheap, available, and supposedly healthy alternative to meats tainted by tales of BSE and foot and-mouth disease.

Take a look at the supermarket special offers as you stock up this Christmas: most are offering vacuum-packed smoked salmon slices at huge discounts.

FARMING in bulk has helped drive prices down - but what cost has the rapid expansion of salmon farming had on dwindling stocks of wild salmon and on the delicate and beautiful habitats they once frequented?And perhaps more pertinently - given what we now know about the horrors of CJD - what are the health risks of eating food reared in such artificial conditions?

The latest research shows that there is a dire need for answers. One chemical, dichlorvos, used until recently as a pesticide in some salmon farms, is currently at the centre of a lawsuit from former fish farm workers in Ireland who claim they contracted testicular cancer as a result of using it.

The Mail has learned that Scottish workers are planning to launch similar cases. There have been other prosecutions for the illegal use of chemicals and a recent government study found dangerous pesticides, such as DDT, to be present in 97 per cent of farmed fish.

Prince Charles has told ministers in London and Edinburgh of his concerns about the threat to wild salmon and trout posed by the farmed fish.

Findings published this autumn seemed to justify such worries: government scientists confirmed that a plague of sea lice found in salmon cages has infected wild fish with disastrous results, virtually wiping out wild salmon populations in certain rivers.

Now, Scottish salmon farmers have been making concerted efforts to clean up their act, but standards still vary. According to aquaculture expert Don Staniford, the damage has already been done. He says: 'The industry is like an oil tanker heading for the rocks. It is desperately trying to turn round, but it's too late.' Yet calls for an independent public inquiry into the environmental effect of the industry, which has enjoyed generous government subsidies in the past, have fallen on deaf ears.

Perhaps the authorities are fearful of destabilising a pounds 700 million industry that provides 6,500 jobs in some of Scotland's most fragile economies. Or perhaps there are things they would rather you didn't know about the salmon that ends up on your plates.

DR RICHARD DIXON, head of policy at WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, gives farmers some credit for finally starting to listen to critics, but warns that significant worries still remain.

He is particularly concerned about the use of chemicals used to counter the problems that arise from rearing fish in such a highdensity environment.

Don Staniford adds: 'More than one million salmon have escaped from farms in the past five years, and many of them are spreading diseases and parasites.' Sea lice, in particular, have been blamed for the demise of wild salmon stocks.  These aquatic ticks lodge themselves on the surface of the salmon, causing distress and irritation. In the wild, a fish might carry two or three of these lice without longterm damage. In captivity, though, the parasites can flourish by the million, killing farmed fish in a frenzy of distress.

To prevent such damage, the salmon farms use a variety of pesticides. But these bring their own risks. Dichlorvos, for example, was banned for most agricultural uses for many years. Yet until recently, many salmon farms continued to use it against sea lice.

Further concerns surround the use of a chemical called Canthaxanthin, which has been fed to farmed salmon to make their flesh pink.

In the wild, salmon get their familiar coloring from natural food sources, such as algae and small crustaceans. Farmed specimens rely instead on additives to replicate this pigment.

The Swiss company which produce Canthaxanthin even supply a color grading chart so that farmers can check they've got the shade right, rather like a decorator using a paint card. But the chemical has been linked to potential eye damage, particularly among the young.

Sun-tanning pills which featured the additive were withdrawn in the Eighties after fears that it could damage the retina, causing temporary blind spots.

There is no evidence that the smaller doses given to salmon have any consequences for humans, but Dr Dixon says that this does not mean they are risk-free.

THE European Commission is deciding whether to reduce the amount of dye by 75 per cent, while in a separate development, it has warned British salmon farmers that they will face an export ban if traces of a carcinogen called malachite green are found in fish.

Recent checks found residues in three per cent of British farmed salmon, despite being banned six months ago. Farmers claim that the chemical, which kills off fungal infections, was present in the fish because it can remain in water for five years after being used.

Most farmed salmon is fed an unvarying diet of concentrated fish meal pellets, which contain traces of pollutants. Over time, these can build up in the fatty flesh of the salmon.

Similar problems have been found with compounds known as dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).  These unpleasant by-products of our industrial past build up in animal tissues and have been linked to a variety of health problems, including cancer and damage to the immune system.

Farmers are now researching alternative feeds, such as vegetable diets, soya and maize.

Meanwhile, the Food Standards Agency is recommending that consumers eat a maximum of one portion of oily fish (salmon, herring or mackerel) a week.  Pregnant women and those trying for children are thought to be most at risk.

THE salmon industry is understandably defensive about its use of chemicals.  'We don't use chemicals - they are approved veterinary medicines,' says John Webster, a marine biologist and adviser to Scottish Quality Salmon (SQS), the trade body which represents around two-thirds of the industry's output.

Then there is the wider environmental question over the longterm damage that intensive salmon farming has had on Scottish waters.

Fly-fishing enthusiasts have watched in despair as the total catch of wild salmon in Scottish rivers has dwindled by almost 40 per cent in the past four years.

This was an issue highlighted by the broadcaster John Humphrys.

While researching his book The Great Food Gamble, he dived to the bottom of a loch where a salmon cage had been sited and found a stygian darkness with no fish life at all.

Considered at close quarters, of course, few aspects of modern industrial farming are very appetising. After all, if we continue to demand cheap salmon on our plates (and, of course, we want it to be pink), then who can blame the farmers who make a profit from meeting that need?

For the moment, it seems that consumers need little convincing.  Sales of farmed salmon continue to increase at around five per cent each year, many consumers believing they are buying a naturallyreared, healthy product, fresh from the water.

But this is battery salmon whose origins provide distressing food for thought as we tuck into the traditional Christmas smoked salmon.

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