This is about how I got into salmon farming in the first place, and why I started to do this research and write a blog.
2000
Just in time for Christmas, I moved back home to Vancouver after 15 years away.
All in all, the 1990s had been an incredible decade. At the end of that wild, sunny summer of Expo '86, I had gone back east to go to McGill. The following summer I went to Guatemala on a scholarship from the Canadian Public Health Association. After I finished my undergrad studies, I worked on a public health project to prevent diabetes in the Algonquin communities in the north part of Quebec. In 1990, I went back to Guatemala to do the research for my Master's degree. One thing led to the next and I ended up staying for six years. Most of the time, I worked for UNICEF. I also did some work for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. In 1996, UNICEF moved me to Indonesia where I worked until the end of 2000.
Zoé, our daughter, was born in Guatemala. She was 3 years old when she and I moved from Guatemala to Indonesia and by the time we got back to Vancouver, she was in the middle of Grade 3. Like most parents, we wanted our daughter to have both roots and wings. Wings she had. It was time for her - and me as well - to get back to our roots.
2001
During the first part of 2001, Zoé and I got settled into North Vancouver. I also did a consultancy in West Sumatra and made my last trip home from Indonesia in June.
As we all tried to come to grips with 9/11, I also tried to figure out what I was going to sink my teeth into for the next ten years while my daughter went from eight to 18. Since my background is Food & Nutrition, naturally, I looked into the food industry. In B.C., the largest sector of the food industry is seafood and within that, the largest sector is salmon.
In our family, we love salmon. I've caught a few, like the humpie (that's what we call a pink salmon) that I snagged while sailing near Malcolm Island, but the real fishing guy in our family is my brother, Stan.
My favorite photo of my Dad is of him coming in the door with a 30 pound Chinook that he caught on the way home from work. That was while we lived in Kitimat and Dad was the librarian at Kildala Elementary School. Better than words could say, his pride shows what wild salmon mean to a lot of us.
Once we had moved back to Vancouver, one of the first places that I took Zoé was to see the sockeye salmon run at the Adams River in the fall of 2001. While we lived in Kamloops, my parents had taken my brother and I there many times. I wanted Zoé to see it too.
The same day that we were at the Adams River, Otto Langer of the David Suzuki Foundation was there too. He seemed to be guiding a group tour. As we walked by their great big, air-conditioned tour bus, we overheard Otto telling his guests that salmon farms were putting wild salmon in danger. It looked like a lot of the people with Otto were Americans but I didn't think much of it at the time.
It grieved me that salmon, the pride of British Columbia, had become such a point of contention. Initially, I believed what I read from various environmental organizations. I thought that the salmon farming industry was out to deliberately exterminate the wild salmon and corner the market. I applied to the David Suzuki Foundation for a position as a Communications Specialist.
In the fall of 2001, the so-called Leggatt Inquiry was on, conducted by the David Suzuki Foundation. I attended several sessions, including the one in Alert Bay, a strong First Nations community on Cormorant Island, a small island just east of the northern tip of Vancouver Island. On the way home from Alert Bay, I stopped at Marine Harvest, a European salmon farming company that has offices in Campbell River. That's where I met Shawn Burke. He's the first real salmon farmer that I ever met. As we stood in the lobby of the Marine Harvest office in Campbell River, I asked Shawn about the clam beds that were being destroyed by salmon farms - or so I had heard in Alert Bay. Shawn explained that in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the anchoring systems weren't very sophisticated so salmon farms had to be located in shallow, slow-moving water. With better anchoring, eventually the farms were re-located in deeper, faster moving water. While the early farms had only about 50 MT tons of anchors, some of today's farms have 700 MT. That's a huge difference, like the difference between a play pen and a prison. Farm by farm, Shawn Burke could rattle off current speeds and ocean depths like an encyclopedia. He really knew his stuff and he didn't seem at all like the sort of eco-rambo that salmon farmers are made out to be. The more I learned about salmon farming, the more I felt that the environmentalists weren't exactly telling the whole story. But why? By November of 2001, I had learned that Marine Harvest had invested a lot of capital in re-building their farms, and from what I could tell, they were also investing substantially in training their people. Everything comes down to people. All in all, the company seemed to have done a lot to address the criticisms that were being levied against salmon farming but as they went along, they hadn't exactly kept the public in the loop so there was a big gap between how people thought that the farms were operating, and how they actually worked. I thought that I could help to close that gap so I asked the president of the company to hire me. He did. 2002 At the beginning of January, I started working for Nutreco as Corporate Development Manager for North America. Back then, Nutreco was the parent company of Marine Harvest. A lot of my job was P.R. Before I even got to work on my first day, there had been an escape of thousands of fish from a farm owned by a small company that operated near Tofino. That company was a bit of a rogue and is no longer in business. Most companies were working extremely hard to avoid escapes and none wanted to be painted with the same brush as that company. Within a few hours on the job, I was writing a press release. Over the next few months, we took the company from a media relations policy of "No Comment" to the point where our best spokespeople where the guys who worked at the farms. They got some of the best media coverage that the industry had ever had. NUTRECO has a lot to be proud of, and I was very proud to work for NUTRECO. We were growing mostly Chinook salmon, we were pilot-testing new technologies and techniques, and we had a fish feed formula that hardly used any fish meal and fish oil at all. In Campbell River, about one in six of my colleagues was a First Nations person. The company was hard-working and conscientious and I felt really privileged to work with such great people. One of the things that many people don't know about salmon farms is that they're dry. Some guys go to work there specifically to get things sorted out, and they do. It was moving to hear how some of them had got into shape and turned themselves around while working in the disciplined routine of a salmon farm - and away from city life.
One of the best things about the big multi-national companies is that they can afford to invest substantially in R & D. NUTRECO had invested about $80 million in better aquaculture technologies and techniques. That's something that small, "mom and pop" companies can't do on their own. 2003 A while earlier, thanks to a new vaccine, the survival rate of young salmon had sky-rocketed from about 50 percent to about 90 percent, especially in Chile. It was a dream-come-true for the veterinarians and the fish health technicians but it was a nightmare for the Sales & Marketing Department because all of a sudden they had to sell almost twice as many fish as they had anticipated. Alaskan fishermen said that fish farmers were trying to sabotage them, but that wasn't at all the case. Like a lot of foods, salmon is a commodity. When supply exceeds demand, prices fall. And that's what happened. Over the course of 2001 and 2002, salmon prices tanked. Our part of the company failed to cut costs. My boss lost his job, and in October of 2003, so did I. 2004 Fortunately for me, I was in love. 2005 On the 1rst of November at about 7:10 in the morning, I was reading the Vancouver SUN when I noticed an op-ed titled, "Got Love to Give? 1,100 B.C. Children Need a Family." I'm adopted so this caught my eye. I had helped support groups for adoptive parents in Guatemala and Indonesia but I had no idea that so many Canadian children are wait-listed for a Mom or a Dad. It moved me to think that British Columbia has a $100 billion dollar economy (read: we're extremely privileged) and yet so many B.C. children are waiting for what my social worker had found for me. I called the B.C. Ministry for Children and Families and was put in touch with the Adoptive Families Association of British Columbia. A few weeks later, I met the executive director and started working as a volunteer. A few weeks after that, she put out her first ever press release and to our enormous delight, the story of B.C.'s 1,174 "wait-listed children" was covered on the front page of The Province. Calls to the Adoption hot-line increased about 14-fold. Its hard to know whether any of those calls actually led to a child getting adopted but I sure hope so. That was the highlight of what had turned out to be a very tough year. I volunteered a lot. One of the things that I learned is that the B.C. government spends millions on children in foster care but about 97 percent of that is spent on keeping them safe. That's important. But it's also important to get them out of foster care and either back into their original families or into another family where they will belong and be loved for life. One of the obstacles to adoption seems to be the invisibility of these children. If we were back in the 1940s, these kids would be in orphanages. But now, they aren't. They are in foster homes which is much better except for the old adage, "Out of sight, out of mind." A lot of people think that you have to go overseas to adopt a child but that's not at all the way it is. Right here in Canada about 22,000 Canadian children are wait-listed to get adopted. I remember thinking one day that these kids would be better off if they were wild salmon, spotted owls or old growth trees. I asked myself, what is it that environmental activists know that children's advocates don't? That's a question that I had often asked myself while I worked for Unicef. We knew that the way to move people is through their emotions, but how? Should we make them feel pity? No way. Guilty? Not that either. Outraged? One day, I googled the words, "create outrage." The seventh link that popped up was a link to the web-site of Peter Sandman. As I eventually found out, Dr. Sandman is a world-renowned expert in Risk Communication and has helped to handle some of the world's worst catastrophes and controversies including 9/11, bird flu, and many environmental disasters. One of the things that Peter is best known for is his brilliant insight encapsulated in this tiny phrase: Risk = Hazard + Outrage. At his web-site, Peter has a list of "Outrage Factors." He explains that environmental activists make us feel angry because they systematically push our buttons by touching on a long list of factors that are well-known to infuriate or scare people. For example, successful environmental campaigns create powerful, memorable images (polar bears stranded on ice flows, for example), they bring about sustained, negative media attention (sea lice supposedly from salmon farms, for example), and they drive home the catastrophic potential and the impacts on future generations of whatever it is that they want the public to be upset about. The more I learned about the tactics that environmentalists use to raise the public mercury level, the more I wished that I had known all that when I worked in salmon farming. I could have done a much better job. 2006 The provincial government of British Columbia was conducting a lengthly, expensive public inquiry into Sustainable Aquaculture. I decided to make a presentation because I thought that Peter Sandman's insights could really help the government, the public and the industry itself to better understand and address the controversy over salmon farming. I had been out of work for three years by this point, and frankly, I really wanted and needed to get back to work. But who would hire an ex-P.R. person from the salmon farming industry? A friend who is a head hunter looked at my resume and said, "Salmon farming. Hmmm. How about if we make that Marine Fisheries." Someone told me, "This would be a lot easier for you if you were coming straight from the U.N." Someone else told me that commercial sex workers were doing a better job of protecting their reputation than the salmon farmers. In November of 2006, I planned to go to the Fish Expo in Seattle and was hoping that Dr. Gunnar Knapp would be there too. Dr. Knapp is an Economist at the University of Anchorage in Alaska. During the fall of 2001, I had read a ton of his stuff, trying to learn as much as I could. On the 16th of November of 2006, I went to Dr. Knapp's web-site to get his phone number. I happened to notice that a day earlier, he had given a presentation in Juneau. It was a Power Point presentation with 112 slides. I read through it slide by slide and when I got to slide #90, the lights went on. Dr. Knapp raised what he considered to be "an important question" about the dramatic increase in Alaskan salmon prices in recent years. Since 2002 - and all the bad press over farmed salmon - the value of Alaskan salmon has TRIPLED from about $125 Million to $409 Million in 2008. No doubt about it, some of that price improvement was probably due to Alaska's $50 Million Salmon Revitalization Program. But Dr. Knapp's question was how much of the increase in wild salmon prices was driven by 1) Alaska's positive salmon marketing, 2) the anti-farmed salmon campaigns by environmental organizations, and 3) prices for farmed salmon. Wow, I thought. When I worked in the salmon farming industry, I hadn't thought through the market impacts of environmentalists' campaigns to "reform" salmon farming. I believed that environmental organizations truly cared about the environment, and I still do. It had never occurred to me that by exaggerating and raising a fuss about alleged environmental impacts, they helped to mitigate the market impacts of farmed fish on consumer demand and prices for wild fish. All the bad press about farmed salmon was helping to shift consumer and retail demand towards wild salmon. It felt like I had finally found the lid to a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle that I had tried to put together when I worked in the salmon farming industry, but couldn't because I didn't have the lid to the box. The above slide reminded me of an e-mail bulletin that I had seen when I worked in salmon farming, in which the Executive Director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) had written about ASMI's work with environmental organizations (ENGOs) and how ENGO materials were used to sell Alaskan fish. When asked by an angry Alaskan fisherman why ASMI doesn't bash farmed fish, ASMI's executive director had written: "... In our case, it is far more credible to leave the attack to third parties, such as environmental groups and newspaper columnists, then it is for us to come out and do it ourselves. We can then leverage that information with a marketing campaign pointing out the positive aspects of our fish using the bad things about farmed fish as our points of difference. And that is exactly what we are doing. In addition, we are helping the people that sell our products or use them in restaurants understand the differences in wild and farmed fish, which includes showing them the material that is being generated by the environmentalists and the media. We also have been working with a number of environmental groups and media for several years now pointing out the purity and sustainability of our salmon, which helps them make their points about the difference in wild verses farmed fish." Looking back, a lot of things that had happened while I worked in salmon farming, started to make sense. For example, as a supporter of the David Suzuki Foundation, I had received a form letter from David Suzuki in which he personally thanked us for having helped him uncover the "fact" that B.C. farmed salmon is heavily contaminated with PCBs and other toxins. But in his so-called study of farmed vs. wild salmon, he only studied eight fish! PCBs are found in literally all foods and in the study publicized by David Suzuki's foundation, both farmed and "wild" salmon had PCB levels that were less than 3 percent of what Health Canada considers to be the tolerable level. Mercury levels were actually higher in the wild salmon in the study publicized by David Suzuki's foundation. Other data compiled by Harvard scientists suggests that tuna and sardines actually have higher levels of PCBs than farmed salmon. In light of these points, it was clear to me that when it comes to PCBs in farmed salmon, David Suzuki didn't actually uncover the "fact" that he said he did. So why did David Suzuki falsely report that B.C. farmed salmon is heavily contaminated with PCBs and other toxins? What I didn't know at the time is that the Lazar Foundation had paid the David Suzuki Foundation to conduct and publicize research on contaminants in farmed salmon. The Lazar Foundation is a pro-Alaskan, American foundation based in Portland, Oregon. As shown below, the Lazar Foundation also paid the David Suzuki Foundation for legal action challenging the expansion of salmon farming in British Columbia. The Lazar Foundation isn't the only American foundation that paid the David Suzuki Foundation for its "scientific," legal and media work. The Pew Charitable Trusts paid the David Suzuki Foundation $US 181,000 "to assess and publicize the risks and impacts of salmon farming in British Columbia on the environment and to curtail the indiscriminate slaughter of seals and sea lions by salmon farmers." That grant was made on the very same day that the Pew Charitable Trusts granted $5.5 Million for the controversial Hites study of contaminants in farmed salmon.
If you're interested in more of the background behind the scare about PCBs in farmed salmon, I wrote a paper titled, "Research on PCBs in Farmed Salmon: Science or Marketing?"
Not until ten years after the fact, I also learned that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund had paid the David Suzuki Foundation $US 425,000 for its legal, scientific and media work and "for organizing First Nations work" along the B.C. coast. Now, why would an American foundation pay the David Suzuki Foundation to organize First Nations work in British Columbia? Of all the places in the world, why would the Rockefeller Brothers Fund pay to get aboriginal people organized in Canada? Do First Nations in B.C. know that the David Suzuki Foundation was paid to "organize" their work? What about aboriginal people in the U.S.? Does the Rockefeller Brothers Fund pay environmental organizations to organize them too? Or could it be that the best way to thwart a Canadian industry - one that could pose a formidable threat to the Alaskan commercial fishing industry and the economic and political stability on which that depends - was to get a well-trusted Canadian to lead a stampede against aquaculture in Canada? Of course, it wouldn't hurt that he just happens to have easy access to the CBC and other highly influential media. In total, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund says that is has paid the David Suzuki Foundation a little over $US 1 Million. Below, here are the excerpts from the annual reports of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which show the grants that were made to the David Suzuki Foundation back in 2000 and 2001. While I worked for NUTRECO, we hosted a tour for the Seafood Watch Director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and one of her consultants. The director was a lot of fun. I really liked her. Even after I got fired, we kept in touch. During her visit, we took her on a tour of one of the company's salmon farms on Saltspring Island. We gave her a ton of information and pointed out that a lot of the material about farmed salmon at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's web-site was out-dated or misleading. Some of it was downright untrue. She promised that she would do something about it but the misinformation never got corrected. Her consultant wrote a report but in my opinion, it hardly reflected any of the information that we gave him. Another time, a film crew asked for a salmon farm tour. The company to agree so off we went. When they realized that we we happened to be going by a farm where the staff were in the process of vaccinating the fish, the film crew was strangely delighted. I explained very clearly that the vaccinated fish were NOT going to end up as steaks or fillets because they were the broodstock, the parent generation, not the salmon that gets to grocery stores. The film crew promised that they wouldn't use any of the images of the vaccination in a way that would mislead people to think that farmed fish get shots. But several years later, that's exactly what happened when the David and Lucile Packard Foundation paid Habitat Media $45,000 to finish its film, Farming the Seas. The Packard foundation is a huge American foundation with a long history of funding the promotion and marketing of Alaskan salmon. In fact, the Packard foundation even paid for part of the initial certification of the Alaskan salmon fishery, by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). According to my calculations based on U.S. tax returns, since 2000 the Packard foundation has paid $US 57 Million to support the MSC and promote MSC-certified fish - most of which is Alaskan. In essence, promoting MSC-certified fish is tantamount to promoting Alaskan "wild" fish, especially pollock and salmon. Other journalists went to extraordinary lengths to be accurate and fair. Charlie Anderson, for example, wrote a three part feature for The Province. He even measured the number of column inches given to the anti-fish farming side and made sure that our side got as much space in the newspaper as our critics/opponents. Once, I took a journalist out for an entire day during which she hardly wrote down a single thing. Either she had an incredible memory (which her story proved she didn't) or she had her mind made up before she even arrived. Her story was titled, "Are you gonna eat that?" I explained that fish farming avoids some of the worst risks to wild salmon such as over-fishing and by-catch and yet her article concluded that if people are smart they would entirely avoid eating farmed fish. Some time later, her organization, High Country News, got a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for $240,000 for "a dedicated reporter/editor." It was things like this that in hindsight, made me think .... hmmm. References:
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Note: This was first posted on 16 June 2010, at my other blog called Fish Farm Fuss.
A pretty solid answer to all of those "where did she come from challenges" in the press. Apparently they weren't able to find this page in your blog!
I read a lot of things in here that made me go hmmmm, as well, and you confirmed a lot of things that I have been thinking! Thanks!
Posted by: Martin Halvorson | 03/06/2012 at 11:53 AM
I have read over your blog and strongly believe that you are on the right path. I have never been a Suzuki fan ever since he first came on the scene and watched as thus man trumpeted one flawed cause after another, it was at one point that he got on the band wagon for climate change saying that the modern ice age was upon us and we would all freeze to death in our beds. Then when Al Gore the same Mr. Gore who invented the "internet " went on the climate change rant about our carbon foot prints et al, Suzuki was there like a dirty shirt touting climate change and how unless we do something we are all going to die, yet was this not the same man who took a few buses across the country spewing diesel fumes everywhere???
This entire climate change is NOT as we are told to believe caused by us but is nothing more than the planet doing what it has always done, correcting itself. Yes we have as a people added things to the enviromant and that is sad in itself but we are not the cause of the enviromental problems, or climate change as we are led to believe. its a natural thing what we are facing and in time it will correct itself as it has done in years gone by.
People should not just accept blindly what they are told and should question and look for them selves to seek answers that make sense and not just to placate groups or them selves.
One just has to look at the amount of money that some people are making off the " chicken little " syndrome and feel disgust at what they see and hear. Start thinking for yourself people, look around and ask the question that works for you not what suits society........nuff said
Posted by: Jim Charlton | 06/29/2012 at 04:53 PM