Loch Hope

Scrap Book

Nasty Business

Fish farms cannot be allowed in a country that considers itself civilised

By Adam Nicolson

Daily Telegraph 17th January 2004

I have, in the past, driven behind a fish farm lorry for half an hour along the long slow roads of the Outer Hebrides. European money has improved stretches of them. You suddenly find yourself on a double-width, unnaturally expensive-looking surface, with unnecessarily large gravelled verges, and you give thanks to Brussels for its structural funds and its love affair with the poor outer margins of the Continent, before returning to the narrow, indigenous strip of tarmac, somehow paid for in the distant past by the Western Isles council.

That is one of the moments when the reality of modern fish-farming hits home. The old road is not the lovely, moneyed euro carpet. It is bumpy and, at each bump, the large plastic containers on the lorry in front of you are given a little jerk. They contain dead, mature salmon, being driven from the farm to the processing plant. But the fish are swimming in their own blood and, at each bump, the blood slops out of the containers, on to the back of the lorry, and sprays the car behind.

You have to keep your wipers going to see through the blood. The whole front of your car is sticky with it afterwards. It is like a horror film, weirdly overstated in its crudity. These blood-bumps are like the evidence of a body in the boot, a horrible slopping-out of a hidden fact.

Why is this so disgusting? Partly, I think, it is a question of deceit. Go into your average supermarket and look at the images with which salmon is sold: fresh, Scottish, beautiful and, above all, clean. You won't find any pictures of windscreens coated in blood, nor, as I have seen, of salmon still alive and thrashing in containers filled to the brim with their own and other fish's blood. Perhaps only in eggs and chickens is there a greater gulf between the realities of production and the deceptions of the chill cabinet.

Fish farms are horrible places: horrible to work in, horrible to look at, horrible in the relationship they represent between money, mass production and the mass consumption of food. In common with all other battery-farming systems, fish farms are inherently careless. Beyond the needs of production, they do not and cannot care about the welfare of the salmon, which is - of course in all but its first and last phases -an oceanic animal, whose entire biological system is designed for the very opposite of the cage.

Beyond the requirements of legislation, they do not and cannot care about the wellbeing of the larger environment, whether that is the seabed, the appearance of the bays and lochs in which they are set up, or the ocean ecosystem itself (where it is thought 40 per cent of all salmon are now farm escapes), because to do so would cost, and margins are so tight that to spend money on anything except the minimum would make a company non-competitive.

And they do not care, beyond the needs of the market, about the quality of the product. Cost is the governing factor in fish farm production and so cheap is good. It would cost more to ensure that the fish are not swimming in their own blood en route to the processing plant.

In 2002, 145,000 tonnes of salmon were produced in Scotland by 1,306 people, about 111 tonnes a man. If the average weight of a farmed salmon is about 3kg, that means each man is producing about 37,000 fish a year, a level at which individual care can clearly not be given.

The average space in a fish farm cage for each salmon is a little over three cubic feet. That is the equivalent for an Atlantic fish of spending your life in the rush hour on the Northern Line.

Is this absurd? Should one be concerned for the life conditions, or even death conditions, of a fish? It always strikes me as strange that people get exercised about farming and its conditions only when there is a food scare.

BSE started to matter in the press only when it was realised that it could cross the species barrier into human beings. The current crisis over farmed salmon is entirely generated by the suspicion that the flesh carries an unacceptable level of marine pollutants.

Those are of course legitimate anxieties and they will no doubt be addressed. Fish farm companies are even now looking for vegetable-based substitutes for their fish-based food and, once they have sorted that out, no doubt the heat will be off. Those supermarket pictures will reassert themselves and everything will be all right again.

But it won't be, because the brutalising methods of production will continue. The jobs involved in this business are usually said to be crucial to the hard-pressed communities that have little other opportunity for employment. And one is meant to bow down before that double god of social and economic need.

But two things need to be said. The jobs themselves are not only uncertain - the economic conditions of the industry yo-yo from year to year - they are both grindingly dull and very demanding. It is not as if greater regulation of fish farming would endanger some exquisite form of indigenous coastal existence.

And it is surely now clear that government, on a global level, needs to improve the conditions in which the fish grow, to reduce the levels of pollution and to improve the quality of the product. In future, people will surely look back on these early years of fish farming and see in them the equivalent of conditions before the great Victorian factory Acts: in a word, uncivilised.