Reykjavík Grapevine - 13.09.2019, Blaðsíða 14

In the past decade, the fjords of Iceland
have been the site of a gold rush as
ambitious promoters have rushed to
draw up plans and apply for permits
to fill every fjord to capacity with open
pen salmon farms. The industry has
been booming, its growth rate exceed-
ing even that of tourism.
For scale: tourism, which many in
Iceland feel has been growing too fast
for its environmental and economic
impact to be evaluated, causing exces-
sive stress on Iceland‘s fragile nature,
grew nearly five-fold between 2008
and 2018. At the same time, the output
of farmed salmon ballooned from just
292 tons to 13,448–a staggering 45-fold
increase.
According to plans outlined by the
industry, the salmon party is just start-
ing. Applications have been filed for
farms with a capacity totaling 130,000
tons of salmon and further plans are
already being discussed. The Icelan-
dic Marine andFreshwater Research
Institute, which conducts risk assess-
ments for aquaculture in Icelandic
waters, has thrown some cold water
on these plans, capping the capacity of
fjords where aquaculture is permitted
at 71,000 tonnes. Since a number of
fjords have yet to be assessed, that total
will likely increase.
Green or not so green
The website of Icelandic Aquaculture,
the primary lobbying group of the
industry, claims that the industry is
the most environmentally friendly
food producing industry in the world
and promotes salmon as the green, or
rather pink, alternative to both white
or red meat. The carbon footprint of
each kilogram of salmon is 2.5 kg of
CO2, less than a tenth of the carbon
footprint of beef and half of that of
chicken. Industry spokesmen claim the
environmental impact
is minimal, which has
quite a lot of appeal to
many Icelanders who
have grown increas-
ingly apprehensive about
further expansion of
hydropower or geother-
mal to power energy-
intensive industries, and
are concerned about the
potential environmental
impact of tourism.
Meanwhile, environ-
mentalists and conser-
vationists have sounded
the alarm. Salmon farming in open
sea pens is a far cry from being envi-
ronmentally friendly or sustainable
according to Jón Kaldal of the Iceland
Wildlife Fund, a nature conservatory
founded in 2017 to protect wild salmon
populations. “When we look at the
various ecological impacts, industrial-
scale ocean aquaculture has, and all the
risks associated with salmon farming
in open sea pens, it is nothing short
of baffling people are willing to make
this gamble. The industry is a ticking
ecological time-bomb.”
Mountains of waste
Open sea pens are simply floating
cages made of nylon nets, anchored
to the seafloor and held afloat by plas-
tic buoys. The cages, which can each
contain up to 200,000 fish who stay
in the pens for up to three years, allow
any waste to flow freely into the ocean.
The waste descends to the seafloor
where mounds of uneaten fish feed,
faecal matter, rotting remains of dead
fish and pesticides used to kill para-
sites all pile up beneath the pens.
“If we use the conservative Norwe-
gian estimate, rather than the figures
from the PR material of Icelandic
salmon farmers, we can see that
salmon farming is a polluting industry
which places enormous stress on the
ocean,” Jón tells
me. I f current
plans for farms
producing 71,000
t o n s a r e r e a l -
ized the industry
would produce as
much sewage as
1,136,000 people,
more than three
times the entire
p o p u l a t i o n o f
Iceland. Jón points
out that while
a l l m u n i c i p a l
sewage and waste
from farming or other food produc-
tion on land, including land-based
aquaculture, must be treated before
it’s released to the ocean, waste from
open sea pens are exempt from such
requirements. “They just dump all of
this into the sea, as if the oceans were
bottomless garbage and waste dumps.
Which they aren‘t.”
Loss of genetic diversity
Research has found that two thirds of
Norwegian salmon stocks show signs
of interbreeding with farmed salmon.
Conservationists fear that the same
will happen in Iceland if the indus-
try continues to expand. If plans for
71,000 tons of salmon farming are
realized, 30 million fertile farmed fish
will be in open net cages in Icelandic
waters. According to Norwegian esti-
mates 0.2% of salmon in open sea pens
escapes, or one salmon for every ton
of farmed salmon. At first glance such
figures don‘t seem very dramatic, but
it means that we can expect 71,000
salmon escaping from the cages, many
of whom would end up swimming into
Icelandic rivers where they will spawn.
For comparison, the spawning stock
of wild Icelandic salmon is believed to
count 50,000 fish.
Creating jobs by
destroying them
elsewhere
The survival of the wild salmon stocks
of Iceland is not only an environmental
question, Jón stresses. It is also a ques-
tion of the livelihood of thousands of
Icelandic farmers and a large and thriv-
ing sports fishing industry which is a
crucial pillar of many rural communi-
ties. Some 1,800 farms receive income
from renting angling rights for salmon
and trout. According to a report by
Economists at the University of Iceland
the angling industry generates 1,200
full-time jobs.
“The spokesmen of sea pen farmers
argue that the industry is crucial for
creating jobs, a mantra which is then
faithfully repeated by the politicians.
But this promised job creation comes
at the cost of other jobs in the tourism
industry and the livelihood of thou-
sands of people in rural communities.
It’s a terrible economic policy to create
jobs in one place by destroying them in
another. Ironically we might not even
be creating any jobs,” Jón adds. ”Grow-
ing automation in the sea pen industry
will likely make this even worse.”
Jón expresses hope that the poli-
ticians can be pressured to see the
environmental and economic logic of
protecting the wild salmon. “I have
nothing against aquaculture. But it has
to be done in a way that doesn’t endan-
ger or destroy nature and animal life.
Salmon can be farmed sustainably in
closed systems on land.”
Dubai of the north
Jón argues that Iceland has perfect
conditions for land-based aquacul-
ture. “But it eats into the profits of
the salmon farming companies and
requires a significant investment,
which they are unwilling to make. The
industry is focused
on fast profit. And
t h e p o l i t i c i a n s
have played along,
relaxing regula-
tions, weakening
oversight and even
offering finan-
c i a l i n c en t i v e s
to encourage the
industry.”
There is some-
thing eerily famil-
iar with this story.
A similar story
could be told of the
great boom industry of the late 90s and
2000s: The financial sector. When the
headlong rush by politicians and reck-
less investors focused on short term
gain and any cost, and their dream of
making Iceland a “Dubai of the North”
came to a crash in 2008 it took down
with it the Icelandic economy. We
can only hope that the salmon farm-
ing boom does not end in a similar
crash, the collapse of the wild Icelandic
salmon.
“We’re
sacrificing the
lives of the next
generation for
our own. Not
even for survival
but for comfort.”
Open fish farms, seen from above. Toxic waste not pictured.
Words:
Magnús Sveinn
Helgason
Photos:
Screenshot
"Under The
Surface"
14 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 16— 2019News
A Pink, But Toxic
Gold-Rush
The controversial salmon farming industry