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Farmed Salmon Boycott
Stand Up for Pacific Salmon: Boycott Farmed Salmon! Humboldt Baykeeper is one of over twenty Waterkeeper organizations from Alaska to California that have launched the Stand Up for Pacific Salmon (SUPS) campaign in their watersheds, respectively. Calling for a boycott of farmed salmon to help protect Pacific salmon from the impacts of net-pen farmed salmon, the Waterkeeper groups are calling on the “Big Six” grocery retailers to remove the product from their shelves.
The SUPS campaign asks customers of Costco, Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Tesco, Kroger, and SuperValu to urge them to follow the example of their fellow retailer Target. In January, the discount chain, on the advice of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s SeafoodWatch program, dropped net-pen salmon from over 1700 Target stores.
Net-pen salmon farms are floating feedlots that have spread sea-lice, pollution, chemicals and infectious diseases into pristine habitats all around the world, including British Columbia and Washington, and are having a devastating impact on wild salmon stocks.
Because of the presence of PCBs and other substances, the journal Environmental Research recommends that farmed salmon should be eaten no more than "between 0.4 and 1 meal per month." This confirmed a similar 2005 study in the Journal of Nutrition, recommending that pregnant women, children, and nursing mothers avoid farmed salmon because of high levels of pollutants.
Other concerns for consumers include the industry’s use of antibiotics and artificial coloring. Without the orange and pink dyes put into their feed, farmed salmon flesh would be a unappealing shade of gray. Best Choices As an alternative to net-pen farmed salmon, we recommend following the guidelines of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program regarding salmon—and of course, as a guide to buying all kinds of seafood, from shrimp to halibut:
Along with Alaska wild-caught salmon, the MBA has recently given “Best Choice” status to coho salmon farmed in freshwater, tank-based systems. Washington-based SweetSpring is one of these. If you can find this sort of farmed salmon, you can purchase it in good conscience.
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Salmon-Killing Virus Seen for First Time in the Wild on the Pacific Coast |
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Written by Cornelia Dean, New York Times
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10/17/11 A lethal and highly contagious marine virus has been detected for the first time in wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest, researchers in British Columbia said on Monday, stirring concern that it could spread there, as it has in Chile, Scotland and elsewhere. Farms hit by the virus, infectious salmon anemia, have lost 70 percent or more of their fish in recent decades. But until now, the virus, which does not affect humans, had never been confirmed on the West Coast of North America. The researchers, from Simon Fraser University and elsewhere, said at a news conference in Vancouver that the virus had been found in 2 of 48 juvenile fish collected as part of a study of sockeye salmon in Rivers Inlet, on the central coast of British Columbia. The study was undertaken after scientists observed a decline in the number of young sockeye. Richard Routledge, an environmental scientist at the university who leads the sockeye study, suggested that the virus had spread from the province’s aquaculture industry, which has imported millions of Atlantic salmon eggs over the last 25 years, primarily from Iceland and Scandinavia. He acknowledged that no direct evidence of that link existed, but noted that the two fish had tested positive for the European strain of infectious salmon anemia. The virus could have “a devastating impact” not just on the region’s farmed and wild salmon but on the many species that depend on them in the food web, like grizzly bears, killer whales and wolves, Dr. Routledge said. “No country has ever gotten rid of it once it arrives,” he said in a statement. |
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First Global Study Reveals Health Risks of Widely Eaten Farm Raised Salmon |
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Written by Institute for Health and the Environment
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A 2004 study published in Science found significantly higher levels of cancer-causing and other health-related contaminants in farm raised salmon than in their wild counterparts. The study, by far the largest and most comprehensive done to date, concluded that concentrations of several cancer-causing substances in particular are high enough to suggest that consumers should consider severely restricting their consumption of farmed salmon. Whereas earlier studies have analyzed anywhere from 8 to 13 salmon samples from individual salmon farming regions, the current study analyzed fillets from about 700 farmed and wild salmon produced in eight major farmed salmon producing regions around the world and purchased in 16 large cities in North America and Europe. The researchers found significantly higher concentrations of contaminants in farmed salmon versus wild. In particular, four substances that have been well studied for their ability to cause cancer — PCBs, dioxins, dieldrin, and toxaphene — were consistently and significantly more concentrated in farmed salmon as a group. The study concluded that the contamination problem is likely related to what salmon are being fed when they’re on the farm. While wild salmon eat a diverse buffet from small aquatic organisms like krill to larger fish, farmed salmon are fed a concentrated and high fat mixture of ground up fish and fish oil. And since chemical contaminants a fish is exposed to during its life are stored in its fat, the higher fat "salmon chow" passes along more of these contaminants to the farmed salmon. Read Full Article |
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Farmed Salmon Decimating Wild Salmon Worldwide |
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Written by James Owen, National Geographic News
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2/12/08 The growing global appetite for cheap farmed salmon is imperiling wild fish populations across the planet, scientists warn. The first worldwide assessment of the impact of cultivated salmon on wild stocks found that where native populations encounter salmon farms, the numbers of wild fish crash, on average, by more than 50 percent. The farmed fish spread diseases and parasites to wild salmon. Some cultivated escapees also interbreed with the native fish, reducing the ability of their offspring to survive, researchers say. "The overall trend, over and over again around the world, is that salmon farming seems to have a negative impact on wild salmon," said lead researcher Jennifer Ford of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "The mortality from farming that we find is really large in many cases—more than 50 percent reductions every year," she added. "That is not sustainable for any populations." A region with an annual farmed salmon harvest of 15,000 tons would suffer an average 73 percent loss in wild populations, the study found. Read More |
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Copyright © 2012 Humboldt Baykeeper. All Rights Reserved.
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Farmed Salmon Boycott
