Executive 'failing' anglers

THE Scottish Executive’s "tunnel vision" concentration on fish farming is destroying the country’s wild salmon rivers, it was claimed yesterday.

Orri Vigfusson, chairman of the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, said a recent independent report had shown that salmon and sea-trout angling was worth 70 million a year and about 2,000 jobs to Scotland.

But he told a rural future conference in Perth it could be worth four times that if the Executive gave angling the support it now gives fish farming.

Mr Vigfusson, an Icelandic businessman and angler, orchestrated the multi-million-pound agreement that stopped fishermen from north-east England drift-netting migrating salmon heading for Scottish rivers.

He said yesterday: "We will look back in future at what is happening now and see it as a dark age in the long history of a precious Scottish resource."

If there were no fish, there would be no anglers, he said. The implications of that for the tourist industry had been missed by the Executive.

"The Executive has been told about this by many people. I’m tired of pleading with your fisheries minister to back the North Atlantic Salmon Fund in halting the serious decline in wild salmon stocks. There has been a stubborn refusal by the Executive to face the facts."

Mr Vigfusson said athletic stadiums and theatres received public help because of their benefit to local economies, but the Executive had failed wild salmon. He said: "It seems to have tunnel vision. It is clearly mesmerised by Scotland’s salmon farming industry, although that industry is only worth about 300 million a year. Given the right encouragement, Scottish angling could come close to equalling that."