Salmon farming has been a Scottish success story. The evidence is there in every supermarket. The industry turns over £700m a year, is responsible for the direct and indirect employment of 6,500 people, and has made salmon Britain’s best-selling fresh fish, with 98% coming from Scottish farms. What was once, except in the tinned variety, a luxury food, has become almost as common as broiler chickens.
However, the industry has always had vociferous critics, particularly among anglers and owners of fishing rights in our rivers. Some farmed salmon escape and contaminate their wild cousins. In the northwest of Scotland, where salmon farms abound in sea lochs, entire river systems face ecological disaster.
Moreover, the conditions in which farmed salmon are reared have distressed many. A couple of years ago the Sunday Times magazine described them: “In the last few days before they meet their pre-sliced vacuum-packed destiny, the fish have little more animation than floating logs.” Readers were deterred from eating farmed salmon.
But the business survived and flourished. And why not? Salmon were backed by nutritionists, and by the Food Standards Agency, as a good source of protein, vitamin D and “heart-friendly fats”. We were told to eat two portions of fish a week — one of which should be oily like salmon. Many of us followed the advice.
However, a study from America, published in the magazine, Science, has now asserted that farmed Atlantic salmon from Scotland contain the highest levels of cancer-causing chemicals in the world. The fish are, it is said, so contaminated that they should not be eaten more than three times a year. They are stuffed to the gills with dioxins, dieldrin, toxaphene, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Enough to make the average consumer’s flesh creep.
Environmentalists, long-standing critics of salmon farming, have naturally seized on the report. Robin Harper, the Scottish Greens’ parliamentary leader, has asked the parliament for an inquiry into feed contamination and why Scottish farmed salmon are more contaminated than those reared elsewhere (except the Faroe Islands). “The results” of the survey, he says, “are devastating. It is quite clear that the controls and strategy in place are simply not working.”
Not surprisingly, Scottish Quality Salmon, the body representing most salmon farms here, doesn’t agree, claiming that consumers should be reassured by this research. Its take on the findings is that PCB and dioxin levels in Scottish salmon are significantly lower than the thresholds set by international watchdogs.
So that’s all right then. We are in danger of being only a little contaminated or poisoned.
Perhaps more reassuring are the words of Sir John Krebs, chairman of the Food Standards Agency, a zoologist and former chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council. He plays down the risk, reiterating that the benefits of eating one portion of oily fish a week “outweigh any possible risk”.
To some all this recalls the sort of complacency with which officialdom typically responds to bad news. They may be reminded of the then agriculture minister, John Gummer, having himself photographed feeding a hamburger to his young daughter at the height of the BSE scare.
Yet Krebs may well be right — just as indeed Gummer was. Health scares are usually exaggerated. Instead of the hundreds of thousands of deaths forecast when, without good evidence, a link was made between new-variant CJD and the cattle disease BSE, there have been just 135. Hamburgers were pretty safe to eat (however unpleasant) when Gummer stuffed that one into his daughter’s mouth; farmed salmon may be just as safe now.
Even the American researchers admit that frequent eating of the fish will increase the risk of cancer by no more than one case in 100,000. These are rather long odds by anybody’s standards.
One might add that, from the ignorant layman’s point of view, it seems unlikely that farmed salmon, no matter what nasty chemicals they may contain, will do us more harm than the supermarket chickens that most of us often eat in one form or another.
Nevertheless the word “cancer” will have its effect. It remains the great fear-word, and, used in connection with any food, will deter many. It’s probable that sales of salmon will fall, at least till a new food scare supplants this one.
Scarcely a week goes by without some previously recommended food or substance being linked to cancer of one kind or another. On the day the American research on farmed salmon was publicised, another report appeared warning that regular consumption of aspirin, though thought to protect against a range of cancers as well as heart attacks, might increase the risk of pancreatic cancer in women.
The salmon farming report is rather important, however. There are around 300 salmon farms in Scotland. Almost three-quarters of the industry’s jobs are in rural areas with fragile economies, which would suffer severely if salmon farming collapsed. In some parts of the north and west the effects would be devastating. MSPs representing these areas will be very conscious of this when Robin Harper’s motion is debated.
Scottish Quality Salmon claims its members’ feed suppliers have been minimising PCB and dioxin levels by sourcing fish meal and oils from less polluted seas and by switching to plant oils. Their critics will argue however that, on the basis of this report, they clearly haven’t done enough.
The American report itself doesn’t, it should be said, condemn salmon farming: one of its authors, Professor Barbara Knuth of Cornell University, says that “my choice would be, if I were to seek out farm-raised Atlantic salmon, to select North or South American sources”.
In other words, American farmed fish good, Scottish farmed fish bad. If she is right, the problem would appear to be one of quality control.
My own guess is that this report actually leaves the argument about salmon farming much where it was before. Even if it is accurate, the risk of contracting cancer from eating the Scottish-reared fish would seem to be very small indeed.
The real arguments against salmon farming remain environmental: its effect on wild fish and on other forms of marine life and marine farming.
The financial value of wild salmon to Scotland is considerable: a total of more than £400m a year. That is arguably being put at risk by the contamination of wild fish by their farmed brethren.
Robin Harper’s demand for an inquiry should be granted. But the inquiry has to be comprehensive, addressing economic, environmental, and health issues. It will take years to complete.
Meanwhile the salmon farming industry can only help itself if it responds to this American survey not by denial, but by imposing stricter standards and controls on the rearing and feeding of its fish.
