Did factory farms spread deadly disease to West Coast salmon?

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Filthy factory fish farms

The study results were released on the heels of a report by Food & Water Watch, a national consumer advocacy group, regarding the “troubling consequences” of factory fish farming.

Zach Corrigan, fish program director at Food & Water Watch, responded to the SFU report by noting that salmon farms present the “perfect conditions” for the spread of the deadly disease.

“While we cannot say for certain what caused this particular outbreak of infectious salmon anemia, salmon fish farms present the perfect conditions for it to spread like wild fire,” said Corrigan. “The salmon industry in Chile, for instance, was devastated by the same virus due to the filthy conditions inherent in factory fish farms.”

“Haven’t we learned anything from factory farming on land? It’s a bastion of disease. We should be pursuing closed-system, land-based fish farming methods instead of factory farming our oceans,” he concluded.

The release of the report exposing the presence of infectious salmon anemia in wild fish on the West Coast couldn’t come at a worse time. The Sacramento River fall chinook salmon run, the driver of West Coast salmon fisheries, is recovering from an unprecedented collapse in 2008 and 2009. Salmon advocates point to a combination of record water exports out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to agribusiness and southern California, declining water quality and poor ocean conditions as the key factors behind the collapse.

Meanwhile, the Obama and Brown administrations are fast-tracking the Bay Delta Conservation Plan to build a peripheral canal to divert more water to agribusiness and southern California water agencies. Delta residents, fishing groups, Indian Tribes, family farmers and conservation groups oppose the enormously expensive and environmentally destructive peripheral canal or tunnel because it would likely lead to the extinction of Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, Sacramento splittail and other imperiled species.

The breakout of a deadly fish disease in wild salmon populations is the last thing we need at a time when salmon populations throughout the West Coast are in crisis. I agree with Alexandra Morton’s contention that Atlantic salmon, produced in environmentally destructive aquaculture facilities in British Columbia, need to be “immediately removed.”