Intensive farming, health and environmental risks… poor salmon, what have we done to you?

As a child, I was dazzled by the story of wild salmon. It was born in our rivers before launching towards the ocean, then returning to reproduce and die in the fresh waters which had cradled it. In the 19th century, “salmon was so abundant in France that employees of large cities demanded, in their employment contracts, a clause prohibiting it from being served to them more than three times a week 1”.

Weary! Endangered, the Salmo salar migratory salmon is no longer the guest of our plates, replaced by farmed salmon, of which France is the fourth largest consumer in the world (4.2 kg per inhabitant per year). The Seastemik and Data for Good associations have just investigated the disastrous social, health and environmental effects of a salmon farming industry whose production has tripled in twenty years 2; and which tends to grow further with a new type of intensive farming in “RAS” (Recirculating Aquaculture System). This closed circuit breeding in land basins, a project of which is being studied in Verdon-sur-Mer (Gironde), makes it possible to increase densities.

Poor salmon, what have we done to you? And what about the West Africans whom we deprive of food resources by fishing in their waters for tons of fish, then reduced to flour for your food? Angry, I don’t want to see you on my plate anymore. Nor in that of my daughters. Even if they clamor for sushi.

1) According to Dominique Martel in his work Fisherman in the Loire. Freshwater memory (Ed. Pathways).

2) pinkbombs.org