Salmon farmers confident of their product
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By Brian Kieran - Campbell River Mirror
Published: December 27, 2011 2:00 PM
Updated: December 27, 2011 2:34 PM
Consumers of farmed salmon can dine with “confidence” despite headline-grabbing deadly ocean virus testimony given at the Cohen Commission examining the decline of Fraser River sockeye.
Testimony, which wrapped up last week, has raised fresh questions about the potential threat of the Infectious Salmon Anaemia (ISA) virus that has ravaged farmed salmon elsewhere in the world.
In the wake of this testimony Campbell River-based BC Salmon Farmers Association Executive Director Mary Ellen Walling said simply: “We have a record of confidence.”
Walling, who attended the commission hearings, said: “The gap in the testimony we have heard is around the lack of knowledge we have on viruses in the Pacific Ocean that may affect wild salmon.
“There are millions and millions of viruses in the sea. They are the most prevalent life forms in the ocean. But, virus does not always equal disease.
“Because we’ve done so much work on farmed fish monitoring we have a record of confidence in the results that we have had over the past decade and we don’t see large numbers of an explained mortalities in our fish.
“If our fish were carrying this ISA virus they would die because this is a virus that has been proven to have a terrible affect on farmed Atlantic salmon ... we’ve seen that in other jurisdictions,” Walling added.
The commission heard new evidence that critics say suggests federal agencies were willing to suppress the truth about risks to salmon to protect industry and trade. One email entered in evidence came from a BC manager of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) which investigated alleged findings of ISA and then refuted those reports. The CFIA manager emailed colleagues in November to praise their “very successful performance” briefing the media. “It is clear that we are turning the PR tide to our favour,” he bragged.
Stephen Stephen, the director of DFO’s Biotechnology and Aquatic Animal Health Sciences Branch, rejected suggestions federal employees pre-judged the ISA investigation.
He defended CFIA’s recent determination that re-testing failed to confirm any presence of ISA in several wild salmon collected separately by a SFU professor and independent biologist Alexandra Morton. However, DFO researcher Kristi Miller told the inquiry that the ISA virus, or something very similar, may have been present in wild BC salmon for 25 years. The CFIA has promised systematic salmon sampling to test for ISA in BC waters starting next year. Craig Orr, executive director of the Watershed Watch Salmon Society, said he believes ISA is present in BC on the basis of the initial tests, although he said it’s unclear what threat, if any, this poses to wild salmon.
“The bigger question is what government is doing to protect our interests as opposed to protecting very narrow interests like salmon farming,” Orr said.
Asked if the hearing testimony represents a public relations setback for salmon farmers Walling said: “It’s always challenging communicating complex scientific questions.
“People want to have confidence in the food that they are eating. They want to have delicious meal. They want to eat something that is healthy. They want to know we are protecting wild salmon in the environment where we are farming.
“We try to be open and accessible in terms of the information we are providing the public,” the association executive director said.
Comments
Ivan Doumenc · Vancouver, British Columbia
The name of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency official who bragged about turning the PR tide is Joseph Beres, Inspection Manager at CFIA.
And here is the email that Beres wrote on November 9 to his colleagues, including Con Kiley, director of the national aquatic animal health program at CFIA:
"Con,
It is clear that we are turning the PR tide to our favour, – and this is because of the very successful performance of our spokes[people] at the Tech Briefing yesterday, – you, Stephen, Peter and Paul were a terrific team, indeed. Congratulations!
One battle is won, now we have to nail the surveillance piece, and we will win the war also.
Cheers,
Joe."
Beres was responding to an email thread in which Con Kiley had previously written:
... "Concentrate on the headlines, that's often all that people read or remember. Both the "Top Stories" and the "Related Pieces"."
This shows the contempt that those public officials have for the public's right to know the truth. More
Reply · 3 · Like
· Follow Post · Yesterday at 6:41pm
Claudette Bethune · Carlsbad, California
If people want to eat a healthy meal and protect the environment, the last thing they would consider eating would be farmed salmon. The considerable lack of open and accessible monitoring information for BC salmon farms is staggering, and the white wash insulting.
Reply · 2 · Like
· Follow Post · Yesterday at 7:53pm
Dennis Reid · 59 years old
1. The entire 'confidence' of Mary Ellen Willing is based on the provincial system. Kristi Miller showed that Gary Marty said the system was using one ISA PCR test, but was not using it. That renders the system useless for ISA. Miller found ISA in chinook pens at 25% of the fish, or in the range of 125,000 sick chinook in Clayoquot.
2. No the main point was that the BC, DFO and CFIA were acting in concert to change the results into negatives and that the Moncton lab was shown not to be able to reach ISA positive results.
3. There are several dozen salmon diseases in the ocean. The killing of wild fish can be stopped by putting farmed salmon on land.
4. It also came out that with scheduled testing days there were few to none dead salmon left in the cages. And the provincial system still showed 29 million dead farmed salmon si...nce 2002. That is twice the level that ISA percolates along and then breaks out, like in Clayoquot Sound.
5. The CFIA testing was done at the Moncton lab that Kibenge, Nylund and Miller all said was not up to international standards. Using the Moncton procedures, Miller found only negatives for ISA in fish she had tested as positive.
6. And by the way, the industry's own figures show only 820 employees so the industry is to small to compare with the environmental degradation they cause. Then need to be on land.
7. The testimony was a hard blow to the the credibility of fish farm claims and those of DFO, CFIA, the BC testing system and the Moncton lab.
8. The industry is never open and transparent. Circa 1995 they argued that the prvincial government could not release the disease data within the government. Then they argued to keep the provincial tables from the Cohen Commission and just the other week, they argued that the Cohen Commission could not release the actual data tables on ISA. Fish farms are not transparent and they use this same tactic around the globe where they set up shop.re
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