Alastair Robertson - Shooting and Fishing

Somehow you just get the feeling that the Chinese are putting one over on us. Bring us your renewable energy technology, they say, and we will take your farmed salmon just so long as you take two non-functioning giant pandas off our hands.

I do not doubt the pandas are lovely, but the Chinese must be delighted to let someone else pay for their up keep for ten years. But it is the approval of farmed salmon exports to China that is most worrying.

Hear the words of our dear leader – and be very afraid: "It's great news. As the vice-premier was pointing out as he enjoyed our marvellous product, that even if 1 per cent of the people of China decide to take the opportunity to eat Scottish salmon, then we'll have to double production in Scotland."

When sea lice from fish farms are already wiping out west coast sea trout fisheries, and farmed fish escapees are getting frisky with wild stocks, doubling production isn't likely to help.

It's not that fish for the Chinese is a bad thing. But we cannot keep up with demand as it is, so is the industry really up to doubling production without causing further damage to stocks of wild fish and the angling tourism industry of the West Highlands?

We cannot expect local authorities to turn down reams of applications for new fish cages. Any attempt to ensure cages are parked away from those areas in which they will do most damage to migrating sea trout or salmon are likely to be brushed aside "in the national interest".

Even before the Chinese came bearing pandas, the industry was buckling under the strain of keeping up with demand. In Argyllshire it simply ignored the environmental agreement it had signed with the Government and wild fish interests when it became commercially inconvenient. The local district salmon board pulled out in protest. "If any one party is only paying lip-service to what they have signed up to, then clearly it is futile to continue," said the board chairman.

If this is what we can expect before the Chinese market opens up, what we can expect when 1.1 billion Chinese want salmon and chips for tea hardly bears thinking about. There has however been a small warning about over production – from Shetland where they still remember the expansion of fish farming ten years ago. Suddenly Shetland was awash with cheap fish no one wanted and all but the big boys went belly up.

Since then Chile, a major producer, has killed off its own industry with disease. Prices have shot up as everyone tries to fill the gap in the market. But what happens to prices and environmentally friendly practices when the Chileans, with their low production costs, get back in the game, is anyone's guess.

• This article first appeared in The Scotsman Magazine, Saturday 29 January, 2011