Fishing and shooting

Published on Sunday 6 December 2009 11:11

When the WWF, aka World Wide Fund for Nature, who we now call Woof, gets into bed with salmon farmers there is something fishy afoot. Woof are the Panda-logo people who spend a lot of time telling us how we are destroying the oceans and forests and how we shall surely pay for our greed and carelessness.

They are probably right. Which makes it all the odder that Woof is prepared to lend its name to a farmed salmon certification scheme. Odd because, with one or two honourable exceptions, anywhere a fish farm is parked near a wild salmon migration route, which they invariably are, the wild fish disappear, eaten alive by the sea lice which live on the farmed fish. Yet Woof is poised to stick its Panda on packets of farmed salmon. No one will bother to find out what the Woof logo is "certifying" and the Panda will lend the product no-questions-asked respectability.

The logo, as the salmon farmers have realised, is a mighty marketing tool. So how does it work, getting a Woof endorsement?

Well, one way, for a salmon farming concern with a bad press, is to surround yourself with scientific respectability, and the great and the good.

Take the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation. Its chairman is Professor Phil Thomas, who is also chairman of the Scottish Aquaculture Code of Good Practice Management Committee; a board member of Quality Meat Scotland and chairman of its research committee; a member of the British Pig Health and Welfare Council, and a member of the Scottish Advisory Committee of Linking Environment and Farming.

He is also on the board of Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) the Scottish Government quango that looks after our wild animals, birds and fishes.

So if I was Woof and I spotted Prof Thomas chairing a leading salmon farming organisation I think I'd feel confident about offering up my logo to members of his organisation.

He is, as we have established, an honourable man in the world of animal science, an habitu of the corridors of power and one whose chief executive at the SSPO said on BBC TV's Countryfile that there is no scientific evidence that fish farming affects wild salmon stocks. Or at least not in Scotland.

This would be all well and good if it were not for the fact the SNH position on farmed salmon and its effect on wild fish is rather less positive.

The entire canon of SNH literature on farmed salmon is littered with caveats including: "These farms will increase the numbers of sea lice in these areas, and there is a clear risk that this will lead to increased mortality in wild salmon and sea trout arising from sea lice infestation."

So who should we, and Woof, believe? Prof Thomas of the SSP0 or Prof Thomas of SNH?

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&#149 This article was first published in The Scotsman on December 5, 2009