The Soil Association has warned it will withdraw from the salmon sector if “meaningful progress” is not delivered in the next year.
The charity, which sets standards for certified organic salmon, has said significant reforms are needed on salmon farms to better protect the environment and give farmed fish a good life.
It has just finished an 18-month review looking at welfare and environmental problems facing salmon farms across the Scottish salmon farming industry.
“The message from our research was clear – the risks to fish welfare and environmental outcomes on organic salmon farms are not at a level that we can accept,” said Soil Association MD James Cashmore.
The report found that despite having the strictest standards in the sector, which have also driven positive change on non-organic sales, these high standards were not going far enough to tackle the risks of these issues occurring on organic sites.
The review also concluded it was possible to bring in standards to better address the issues, if done alongside strong action and commitment from the industry and government.
The Soil Association is seeking substantial reform over the coming year, including improving welfare, tackling mass mortality, ensuring feed is more sustainable, and stopping chemical veterinary treatments being released into the sea.
“Although we are proud to say that we have been driving standards up on salmon farms across the Scottish industry for more than 20 years, our evaluation has revealed there’s more we could do,” said Cashmore. “But we also need to see concerted commitment from Scottish government and wider industry to ensure the wide-ranging impact that’s needed.”
Improved regulation
Proposed changes to Soil Association organic standards include taking a tougher stance on mass mortality with work to prevent such events. If they do occur, suspension and full site suitability reassessment would take place after two events. This would come alongside a new suite of welfare checks in addition to the daily checks already carried out.
The charity has also said that it does not believe salmon farming can be sustainable in the long term while it depends on deltamethrin, a persistent chemical used as a vet treatment. It proposes phasing it out.
The first step would be to prevent it from being released into the marine environment within the next 12 months, which the charity said was essential to its continued involvement in the sector.
Under the proposals, Soil Association certified salmon producers would no longer be permitted to use whole fish from certified sustainable fisheries and instead would only able to use sustainably sourced waste and trimmings to feed salmon in marine sites. This would go further in preventing fish being caught primarily to feed farmed salmon.
Asks for Scottish government include regulatory action on site suitability, sea lice, and mortality, and legislation that would set specific baseline standards for the welfare of farmed fish.
It comes as the Aquaculture Stewardship Council’s newly released Farm Standard has been criticised as endorsing “irresponsible salmon farming practices” that place wild fish and marine ecosystems at risk.
Campaign groups have said that the criteria are either outdated or have been weakened over the past decade to accommodate industry ‘business as usual’ practices.
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