Smoked salmon is a very lucrative product all year round but this is the time of year when supermarkets go large on their festive marketing. Sales are turbocharged.
Salmon is synonymous with a luxurious, classy, upper-middle class Christmas. Sadly, the reality is grim. Factory farming salmon has an appalling impact on the planet.
This year, environmental campaigners, animal rights activists as well as human rights and inequality experts are lining up to urge consumers to do the right thing and avoid this highly problematic product. As multiple legal complaints to Competition and Markets Authority attest - nothing about factory farmed salmon is as it seems.
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Support independent eco journalism that drives real change."The reality of farmed salmon is a far cry from the image that the industry is trying to sell us. Nothing about intensively farmed salmon is luxurious or special - ironically especially so at this time of year when we see escalating salmon deaths and high sea lice levels on farms. The destructive environmental impact, terrible welfare standards and undeniably unsustainable practices of the industry have no place in the season of goodwill."
Sondhya Gupta, Campaign Manager, Off the Table
The claims that factory farmed salmon is “responsibly sourced” are clearly bogus. From the packaging it looks like farmed salmon is produced in crystal clear Scottish waters. In reality, the giant factory cages are filthy and polluted. The staggeringly high mortality rates mean that dead fish float past their mutilated living cousins. Chemicals are heaped on top to control disease and parasites. The seabed beneath is dead.
“All the pesticides and waste produced by farmed salmon are dumped, untreated, in the sea. Parasitic sea lice breed on the farmed fish and also harm wild salmon, but the industry is fighting tooth and nail to prevent new regulations from limiting the number of lice. Many people make a living from the sea, producing seafood. They rely on it being healthy and unpolluted. Coastal communities have had enough of the salmon farmers treating the sea like a sewer. They must stop pretending their practices are sustainable. It is time for them to clean up or clear out."
John Aitchison, aquaculture spokesman for The Coastal Communities Network Scotland
Marks and Spencer labels its salmon products “responsibly sourced” but animal welfare experts describe the conditions the animals are raised in as a "nightmare".
Lex Rigby from Animal Equality has been campaigning against the hidden cruelties of factory farmed salmon for several years.
"Factory farmed salmon suffer horrendous lives - crammed inside filthy underwater cages, where disease runs rife, and eaten alive by frequent outbreaks of parasitic sea lice. It's no wonder one in four fish die before even reaching the slaughterhouse.
"The industry cares little for the lives of these animals and use clever marketing tactics to conceal the truth. Consumers are being misled into believing fish farming is the sustainable solution to overfishing - it's not."
Lex Rigby, Animal Equality
Consumers may be led to believe that by consuming farmed salmon they are easing pressure off wild stocks of fish. Sadly, this also isn’t true. Salmon is a predatory fish, so, to farm them, they must be fed enormous quantities of wild caught fish.
In many cases, the worst kinds of industrial fishing are used to extract huge numbers of wild fish to feed the caged salmon.
Natasha Hurley from Foodrise (formerly Feedback Global) has studied the knock-on effects this has on communities as laid bare in report Fishy Finances – exposing industrial salmon farming’s biggest financial backers.
“Communities in the Global South are being deprived of food and livelihoods to feed salmon which primarily ends up on dinnerplates in high-income markets like Europe. There’s chronic food insecurity in regions where oceans are plundered of wild fish to make fishmeal and fish oil for the salmon farming industry. Shockingly, Norwegian salmon farming’s demand for fish oil is depriving up to 4million people of fish in West Africa.
“More and more communities are rising up to oppose the worldwide expansion of salmon farming. From Scotland, Norway, Iceland, France, Canada and the USA in the Northern Hemisphere, to Argentina, Chile and Australia in the Southern Hemisphere, salmon farming is encountering fierce resistance wherever it goes.”
Natasha Hurley, Foodrise
Shockingly, the industry is now turning its attention to land-based salmon production, a new form of factory farming which will only exacerbate the salmon industry’s existing harms. Which is why Foodrise and its French partner Seastemik has published a new briefing Fish out of water: Pulling the plug on land-based factory farms.
In 2020, in between the first two lockdowns, the Ecohustler crew went and filmed Loch Stock and Salmon to explore the issues. The film won an award in the Oceanic Global Short Film Festival.
Off the back of the success of the film we set up a petition on 38 Degrees calling on M&S to stop labelling their salmon products “responsibly sourced”. The petition is still live and has 120,000 signatures and growing.
It is a sad state of affairs that five years later all the same problems remain. However, it seems that finally the message is cutting through.
"The tide has now turned against toxic salmon pharming with King Charles revoking the Royal Warrant for Norwegian-giant Mowi. This is a watershed moment in the fight against salmon farming globally. Supermarkets like Marks and Spencer should now follow the royal lead and remove all farmed salmon from their shelves - Scottish salmon belongs in the bin not your supermarket basket. Please join the global boycott against Scottish salmon."
Don Staniford, Director of Scottish Salmon Watch
Whether you care about animal welfare, the environment or the rights of coastal communities who depend on local fish in their diet, the message is clear…
Don’t buy factory farmed salmon this Christmas.
