Growing coalition calls for moratorium on salmon feedlots
Posted Mar 12, 2012 03:35:10 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Conservationists, commercial fishing groups and environmental organizations are just a few of the groups taking on the provincial government’s plan to expand open net pen salmon aquaculture in Nova Scotia.
Marike Finlay, the VP of the Association for the Preservation of the Eastern Shore, says the use of chemicals and generation of waste hurts the lobster trade, tourism and the overall water quality in the area.
“The quantities that are going to be put into the waters in Nova Scotia with the offshore fish lots are greater than the human sewage we’ve taken out of the water with treatment plants,” she explains. “The excrement will re-suspend because these pens are frankly in too shallow waters. They should be in 30 metres and they’re going to put them in places where it’s sometimes 10 or 20 metres.”
She says when the wind blows, it will wash the sediment up onto the shores, making them fouled by all the excrement.
Finlay says work is being done to bring back wild salmon stocks on the West River near Sheet Harbour.
“Last year the counts revealed that were about 11,600 salmon smolts that went back up into the river, so in fact we’ve got the beginnings of, once again, a very viable wild salmon fishery,” says Finlay.
She tells News 95.7 she understands there is a hunger for salmon and that wild stocks could never meet the demand, but she says a better solution is closed pen salmon farming on land.
“First of all, it will create far more employment than open pen fish farming will create, but the other reason is more and more people, they don’t want to eat farmed salmon because of all the chemicals in the salmon and because of the colouring put in the salmon,” she says.
Finlay maintains the vast majority of people living on the Eastern Shore don’t want the farms, and suggests that could mean big changes if politicians don’t listen.
“They certainly will not get re-elected on the Eastern Shore if they ram this down our throats,” she predicts. “When they were not in power, down in Port Mouton, [MLA] Vicki Conrad and [Premier] Darrell Dexter said that governments didn’t have the right to do something against the will of their communities. Well they’ve turned around and seem to be imposing that on this community right now.”
More than 50 organizations signed a letter sent to the Premier on March 4th asking his government to reconsider the expansion.
