Reykjavík Grapevine - 25.08.2017, Side 12

Visit any supermarket in Iceland, and
in the cold meats section you will in-
variably see fillets of smoked salmon
and trout for sale. Some of it may have
been caught in the wild, but a lot of it
has been farmed. Fish farming is a rela-
tively new concept in Iceland, but it’s an
industry that is trying to grow, with the
promise that it could bring hundreds of
jobs to certain areas of Iceland. While
the production would market itself by
capitalising on the country’s image as a
pristine natural paradise, it could in re-
ality spark an ecological crisis, causing
irreparable damage to one of the oldest
parts of Iceland’s tourism industry.
To find out which direction the pro-
ject may go, we need to learn from how
aquaculture (as fish farming is more
accurately referred to), has played out
in other parts of the world. Through re-
search and talking to those connected
to this fishing technology, Grapevine
has learned that the touted benefits of
aquaculture may be outweighed by the
environmental and financial conse-
quences.
Big fish, little fish,
swimming in the water
Salmon is farmed at the highest rate
in Iceland, and it has been growing
rapidly. Iceland farmed 292 tonnes of
salmon in 2008. Four years later, the
country was farming ten times that
amount. In 2016, Iceland more than
doubled that amount, producing about
8,000 tonnes.
Plans are currently in the works to
increase the number to 10,000 tonnes,
which could translate to anywhere
from 100 to 230 new jobs in the West-
fjords region.
Snorri Björn Sigurðsson, the Direc-
tor of Development for the Icelandic
Regional Development Institute, be-
lieves this expansion is crucial to the
livelihood of people living in the West-
fjords.
"Aquaculture has had the biggest
effect on the southern Westfjords,
because there has been the greatest
decrease in jobs there, and with it a
decrease in people,” he told us. “The
decline has been tremendous, some-
thing around 30%, as would be the case
if it were a war zone."
Indeed, even the Westfjords’ largest
municipality, Ísafjörður, has lost about
1,000 residents between 1998 and 2017,
according to Statistics Iceland. While
the Westfjords has also been consist-
ently one of the most employed area
of Iceland for many years, areas like
the town Tálknafjörður showed an un-
employment rate of 7.5% in June 2017,
which is well above the national aver-
age of 1.9%. Other municipalities in the
region have had similar rates of unem-
ployment in the recent past, but have
since recovered.
It only takes one
One need only read reports, stretching
from Chile to America’s Pacific North-
west to Norway, to see that aquacul-
ture is anything but a green industry. It
only takes one fish escaping from a pen
to have devastating impacts on local
wild stocks. This damage can be done
in the form of muddying the genetic
balance of the stocks, or introducing
diseases such as fish lice to the wild.
Even Alaska, a state that has looked the
other way when it comes to the envi-
ronmental damage of oil drilling, has
outright banned salmon farming. Why
should it be any different for Iceland,
a country that prides itself on the im-
maculate conditions of its natural en-
vironments?
“I think that of course people need
Words:
Paul Fontaine
Photos:
Adobe Stock
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Fish Farming: New
Opportunities,
Old Dangers
The environmental impacts may
outweigh financial gains
ANALYSIS
Fish farming in Súgandafjörður - Photo by Tabor / Adobe Stock
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