U.S. interests pull our strings again
Email
Print
Letter to Editor
Share
Updated: November 04, 2009 7:17 AM
If you go to the grocery store and buy a can of sockeye salmon, chances are it will say “product of U.S.A.” on the label.
The can I’m holding is a house brand at a B.C. supermarket chain. The label lists the ingredients – sockeye salmon and salt – with Canada’s mandatory nutrition chart. It doesn’t say it’s from Alaska, which it likely is, but it does have a logo saying “wild Pacific salmon,” which is debatable.
With some B.C. sockeye runs in apparent collapse, our commercial and even aboriginal food fisheries banned, Alaska and Washington fisheries are stronger. The reason is the U.S. uses salmon ranching, where billions of salmon fry are raised in tanks, fed pellets until they’re big enough and then released.
Canada resists this, which leaves a massive meat fishery at the expense of genetic diversity and habitat truly wild salmon need.
In a seagoing version of the American west, ranched salmon graze the commons bald as wild herds disappear. Salmon ranching is the prop that holds up the western U.S. commercial and aboriginal fishery.
The implications for B.C. are frightening.
Washington state fights a lawsuit brought by area native tribes, demanding millions be spent repairing state highways where culverts have cut off salmon streams.
The state called Recreation and Conservation Office representative Jeffrey Koenings to testify about the urgent need for site-specific programs and targeted harvesting of hatchery fish, rather than opening the rest of the range to herds.
Ranched Pacific salmon don’t just flood the West Coast habitat, they interbreed with wild stocks. The Americans ranch chum, pink and chinook and sockeye, said Koenings, and all but four of Puget Sound’s 22 watersheds are dominated by hatchery fish.
None of this is discussed in B.C. Here, it’s all about the alleged evils of fish farms. Why? One reason could be a massive negative marketing campaign financed by U.S. foundations to discredit farmed salmon.
Former Kitimat resident Vivian Krause said the campaign flooded media with warnings, first about PCBs in farmed salmon, and now about sea lice.
David Suzuki and Alexandra Morton were asked how much funding their foundations accepted for a campaign that demonizes fish farms and coincidentally benefits Alaska and Washington interests.
She says the David Suzuki Foundation has received more than $10 million from these U.S. sources.
Few understand the impact of this “farmed and dangerous” campaign better than Port McNeill Mayor Gerry Furney, whose community lost a nearby salmon processing plant this year because of it.
Furney notes that the same U.S. foundations attacked B.C.’s logging industry more than a decade ago, with similarly dubious claims in full-page ads in the New York Times
Next week: North to Alaska.
Tom Fletcher is a legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press newspapers. tfletcher@blackpress.ca
v2
