British Columbia’s $1.4- billion salmon industry is facing another major crisis that will devastate commercial salmon fishing in four years, warns the B.C. Aboriginal Fisheries Commission.

“This (latest) disaster is like a hammer blow,” says commission spokesman Ernie Crey.

Recent early government projections on one Fraser River salmon run shows fewer than 10,000 sockeye, instead of an estimated 90,000, reaching their spawning grounds.

Crey says the net result will see “no commercial fishing four years hence and very little aboriginal fishing . . . a development that will be devastating for the 97 Indian bands that rely on fishing.”

George Froehlich, Business Edge
Fisherman and merchant Sasha Berger believes the outlook for the wild salmon industry is dismal and getting worse.

B.C.’s commercial salmon fishery is valued at $183.6 million.

The latest setback comes when there has been an abundance of salmon in other areas this year, based on historical levels.

“It has been one of the best years in a decade for recreational fishing,” says Eric Kristianson, a spokesman for the Fishing Institute of B.C., a group that represents B.C.’s $600-million recreational fishing industry.

Kristianson adds the reduced Fraser River sockeye run will have “very little impact” on recreational fishing. Only about five per cent of recreational fishing constitutes sockeye fishing, with the rest mainly focused on chinook and coho.

The news came in the midst of a major upheaval in the global seafood business, as B.C.’s salmon sector tries to garner market share.

Recent reports show world seafood production is showing steady growth, rising to 142 million tonnes in 2001, compared with 100 million tonnes in 1987. Furthermore, global output is expected to grow by an additional 20 to 30 million tonnes by 2020. And most of the growth will come from farmed fishing.

But farming fish in B.C. isn’t without major controversy as environmental groups are questioning the methods used by an industry that is largely controlled by foreign companies.

Viewpoints on the industry’s future differ considerably among various players.

Sasha Berger, a 27-year-old commercial fisherman who sells his catch to the public off his small boat moored in False Creek near Granville Island Market, says the wild salmon industry faces a dismal future.

Berger has been fishing with his own boat for eight years, and says the price of wild salmon has been declining anywhere from 30 to 40 per cent in the last six to seven years. He blames the inroads made by farmed salmon as the main reason – farmed salmon is about half the cost of wild salmon and “a lot of buyers switched from wild salmon to farmed salmon,” he says.

The biggest controversy facing farmed salmon is how safe it is to eat. David Suzuki, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, recently branded farmed salmon “poison.”

His comments, and those of other environmentalists, have placed the farmed salmon industry on the defensive.

“No less than the National Cancer Institute, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Council on Science and Health, the American Heart Association, the World Health Organization, the National Fisheries Institute and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have all declared farmed salmon to be a healthy, nutritious food,” retorts Laurie Jensen, president of Grassroots Positive Aquaculture Awareness, an industry group representing all the participants in the farmed salmon industry.

Last month, following the release of a major U.S. scientific study that concluded that levels of chemical fire retardants were higher in farmed salmon than in wild salmon, the Canadian government issued a statement saying both wild and farmed salmon were safe.

Mary Ellen Walling, executive director of the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association, agrees her industry is facing challenging times. The biggest hurdles, she says, are those posed by the provincial and federal governments over the time it takes to issue the standard 10-year site permit so a business can operate a salmon farm.

And the regulatory costs of going through the process are high, anywhere from $150,000 to $250,000.

Walling believes the environmental groups, often well- funded U.S. foundations with millions of dollars at their disposal, attack salmon farming because “they see the ocean as the last frontier.”

But Craig Orr, executive director of the B.C.-based Watershed Watch Salmon Society, believes salmon farming in B.C. is in dire straits.

“There is a consumer revolt going on against farmed salmon because of the health concerns raised by scientists,” he says. “In the U.S. (about 75 per cent of B.C.’s farmed salmon is exported to the U.S., its biggest market) shows such as Oprah Winfrey and Kathy and Regis all have talked about the danger of eating farmed salmon, and that has hurt sales.”

Orr’s group is not against salmon farming but believes it has to be done in an environmentally safe way.

“We seem to be the last frontier,” he says. “They (the multinational companies that operate salmon farms in B.C.) came here with a wild abandon.”

Jensen admits the farmed salmon sector has made mistakes, “but we are starting to mature as an industry,” she says. “We know what works and what doesn’t. We have become very high tech. We can now track the fish from birth to harvest, and that is safe and pretty incredible.”

Like Crey and Berger, however, Orr also believes that the wild salmon sector is facing a bleak future.

“There is a suspicion that the federal government wants to get out of the managing of salmon resources,” he adds, “because it is so unpredictable . . . unlike salmon farming, which can be almost run like an industrial plant.”

Different sectors of the industry do agree there has to be more co-operation and discussion among them in the hope of finding a successful strategy.

Earlier this year the B.C. government released an extensive report prepared by outside consultants that concluded other fishing sectors in B.C. are operating reasonably well. “(But) the B.C. salmon fishery has none of these characteristics,” the report said, noting a lack of viability, an inability to meet market needs, ineffective organizations, and insufficient co-operation and trust do not allow it to operate successfully in the global seafood industry.

Another report from the federal government noted the salmon industry is in danger of collapsing, and federal Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan has said the industry requires a major overhaul and is close to bankruptcy.