Fish farms

The province is expected to make a decision about lifting the moratorium this summer. The David Suzuki Foundation wants the decision to be cautious.

BC's moratorium on fish farm expansion and subsequent environmental review were triggered by an outbreak of triple antibiotic-resistant disease among BC farmed salmon.

Our threatened fishing industry prompts a 10-point program to protect BC salmon.

by David Ellis

The first forecasts are in for commercial salmon fishing for 2000, and, not surprisingly, they're not good. Harvest opportunities for Fraser sockeye might range "from limited to none," says the DFO, and the northern troll fleet will probably be shut down for the season due to the concern for coho and chinook.

By the end of the decade, fish farming may overtake cattle ranching as a food source.

by Lester R. Brown, 2000 Worldwatch Institute (C)

Aquaculture, growing at 11 percent a year over the past decade, is the fastest growing sector of the world food economy.

Climbing from 13 million tons of fish produced in 1990 to 31 million tons in 1998, fish farming is poised to overtake cattle ranching as a food source by the end of this decade.

Rather than a powerhouse of economic development for hard hit rural communities, the foreign-owned fish farms crowding BC's coast are ecologically unsustainable and barely profitable.

by Laurie MacBride and Suzanne Connell, Georgia Strait Alliance

Despite abundant evidence that it's the wrong thing to do, in September the BC government lifted the seven-year moratorium on new salmon farms.

Thanks to constant pressure from salmon activists and NDP MP Pe­ter Julian, the federal government has recently announced that it will conduct a judicial enquiry into the disappearance of the Fraser River sockeye.

by Joe Foy

It was a September day in the Fraser Valley that seemed just about perfect, with a robin’s egg blue sky

by Wayne Cullen

Pink salmon returns were big eve­rywhere this year except, once again, the Broughton Archipelago, where fish farms are suspected of causing smolt death due to sea lice infections. The Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture

A new study published in the March 30th edition of the prestigious scientifi c journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B (a publication of the UK’s national academy of science) shows that the transfer of parasitic sea lice from salmon farms to wild salmon populations is much greater and more extensive than previously believed. 

This quantitative analysis of parasite transfer is a scientific milestone in a contentious debate. It is the first to isolate and measure the impact of a fish farm on sea lice outbreaks in wild salmon.

In 1992, malachite green was banned from use in aquaculture in Canada by Health Canada, yet traces were detected in Canadian and imported farmed salmon and trout in 2005.

by Delores Broten 

This is a fishy story. Its central character is a

by Ruby Berry, Georgia Strait Alliance

If the wild salmon are going to survive, the open net cage farms must get out of the water. If the salmon aquacul­ture industry is to survive, it must get into closed contain­ment.

Most British Columbians are calling for this transition.