Going wild over farmed salmon

By GEOFF CUMMING

At waterfront cafes and in restaurants miles from the sea, an unattractive grey fish with pink flesh is as ubiquitous as steak.

Salmon's delicate, oily taste and flesh which crumbles in the mouth make it a menu staple at quality nosheries. Hot- or cold-smoked with myrtle and thyme, wood-roasted on truffle oil-infused potato mash, or gravlax with ginger marscapone, salmon is on a roll.

High in protein, low in fat and rich in Omega 3 fatty acids, its image as brain food has propelled it into household shopping baskets as well.

It's a facelift on a plate: eat it twice a day for three days to fight wrinkles, American dermatologist Nicholas Perricone wrote in The Perricone Prescription, which prompted a run on salmon in US fish shops. Pregnant women are told it will help to produce brighter offspring and avoid postnatal depression.

Soaring demand for salmon and other "healthy" fish - and diminishing wild stocks - has helped to make marine farming, or aquaculture, the world's fastest-growing industry, worth $54 billion and rising.

With its clean waters and 17,000km coastline, New Zealand should be in the vanguard of this boom, say fish-farming proponents who aim to turn the boutique industry into a billion-dollar export earner.

But if New Zealand is to swim with the big fish it needs to diversify into high-value finfish species such as kingfish, snapper and grouper which, unlike South Island salmon, can be farmed in warmer northern waters, says marine scientist Andrew Jeffs.

A breeding trial at Niwa's Bream Bay hatchery has wildly exceeded expectations, producing 30,000 kingfish with the potential to fetch hundreds of dollars a kilo in sashimi restaurants in Japan.

"If the Government wants to close gaps with Maori and spread economic development, then aquaculture has a lot going for it," says Jeffs, of the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa).

While relative newcomers Australia and Chile are plunging into aquaculture, the New Zealand industry's progress is as tortured as those wild salmon which battle freshwater rapids to spawn after years at sea. A moratorium on marine- farming applications expires next March, but new laws to govern the industry have struck political and bureaucratic rocks.

And as fish-farming proponents complain that New Zealand is missing the boat while the Government dithers, environmentalists are questioning whether it's an industry New Zealand should be encouraging at all.

Overseas, a fish-farming backlash is in full swing with consumer boycotts persuading supermarkets on both sides of the Atlantic to stock only wild salmon, whose continued survival is said to be threatened by tank-reared, force-fed super salmon spreading parasites and disease.

Farmed salmon has been labelled the most toxic food in British supermarkets after a survey by Government scientists. Their diet of fishmeal and fish oil pellets comes from "trash" fish which environmentalists say is contaminated with cancer-causing dioxins, PCBs and DDT.

Wild salmon get their pink flesh by dining on krill. Chemicals must be added to farmed salmon feed to produce the desired colour. The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has even produced the Salmofan, a handy colour chart allowing farmers to choose the colour of their fish in the same way we choose paint for our homes. A dye called canthaxanthin is the most popular for its vibrant colours, but a European Union study last year warned that it may harm human eyesight and ordered European salmon farmers to use less.

British marine scientist Don Staniford likens the intensive cage farming practised in Canada, Norway, Scotland and Chile to battery hen farming. In salmon hatcheries, artificial light is used to alter eating patterns to make fingerlings grow faster. Once big enough, they are transferred in their thousands to sea cages where overcrowding leaves them prone to diseases and parasite infestation. Antibiotics added to their feed to ward off infection enter the foodchain.

Many fish escape, spreading disease to other species and interbreeding with wild salmon. The untreated waste discharged by tonnes of overfed salmon has a catastrophic effect on the marine environment, says Staniford, who won an environmental media award last year for his part in exposing illegal chemical use by Scottish salmon farmers.

He says the health and environmental concerns associated with salmon apply to all finfish farming.

He is due in New Zealand this year to investigate New Zealand King Salmon's unfortunate 1999 experiments with genetically modified salmon and to look at the industry in general.

The emerging health concerns overseas have been seized on by locals who oppose marine farms for other reasons - because they are a visual blight on an otherwise empty bay or threaten access for recreational fishers, boaties and traditional shellfish gathering.

Visual concerns counted for little last year when the Northland Regional Council gave resource consent to test a kingfish and snapper marine farm at Peach Cove, alongside a bush reserve at Whangarei Heads. The application was processed just ahead of the moratorium.

But when locals organising an appeal began reciting Staniford's "five fundamental flaws of fish farming", the applicant, Maori-owned Moana Pacific, withdrew and is now threatening to take the venture overseas. "It was going to cost us an awful lot of money fighting the appeal," says chief executive Bruce Young. "They were asking questions we couldn't answer until the farm was in operation."

Fish-farming flagbearers in this country say the mistakes and environmental problems which have marked the industry's growth overseas can be avoided here as long as the scale remains small and dispersed. The parasites and diseases plaguing Scottish and Canadian salmon are not present here, so antibiotics are not needed. Nor is canthaxanthin used here, although a similar colourant which is, astaxanthin, is being investigated by the European Commission.

The location of our salmon farms in the Marlborough Sounds and Stewart Island rules out the risk of interbreeding with the "wild" chinook population, which was itself introduced.

In fact, say industry leaders, our clean, green image and disease-free waters could give New Zealand a marketing edge as concerns about overseas farmed salmon grow.

"You only create a mess if you don't put them in the right place," says Graeme Coates, executive officer of the Marine Farming Association. "You need deep, fast flowing water - we can go to places where these things don't have an impact."

But Staniford says the industry's attempt to distance itself from international experience is "either naive or absurdly arrogant". Even if the environmental effects are minimised, he says, farming of carnivores like salmon, kingfish and snapper is unsustainable because of the enormous quantities of wild fish which must be killed to provide feed.

"Sea cage fish farms are a cancer on the coast and weeping sores on the face of our blue planet," he says.

"If you think you are missing this particular boat then maybe you are missing the Titanic. It's a can of worms - don't open it."

But those promoting fish farming's expansion are as evocative in their defence. Aquaculture can do for our future economy what agriculture has done for our past, while taking up far less space and causing less environmental harm, says Coates. He points out that marine farms at present occupy around 4000ha - about the size of an average high country farm - yet generate $280 million a year.

The industry aims to double its earnings by 2010 and reach $1 billion by 2020, while taking up 17,000ha. "It's phenomenally efficient when you compare it to land-based stuff."

Niwa's Andrew Jeffs says with wild fish stocks at maximum yields, there's a looming shortage of Omega 3 fatty acids essential for brain and body development. "What are the alternatives if we want our meat and three fatty acids?"

Most salmon swallowed by New Zealanders comes from farms run by Malaysian-owned New Zealand King Salmon in the Marlborough Sounds and Canadian-owned Sanford Ltd off Stewart Island. Locally owned Akaroa Salmon supplies whole fish and cuts to leading restaurants.

NZ King Salmon chief executive Paul Steere says the company's four sea farms in the Marlborough Sounds are small in international terms, at less than 2ha, and spaced well apart. The pens are moved regularly to prevent seabed wastes reaching unhealthy levels.

An intensive broodstock selection programme takes place at the company's freshwater hatcheries. Just like sheep, says Steere, fingerlings from one family group are crossbred with another to obtain desired characteristics and match production to market needs. Computer chips are inserted to monitor growth, colour and fat content.

The sea farms are closely monitored to ensure the diseases which have closed farms overseas do not take hold here.

"At the end of the day, it's in our company's interests to operate in a sustainable way. It's not like the Klondike - we have not gone in and plundered."

But the industry has more pressing issues to deal with than the rising tide of environmental horror stories from overseas - such as, just who will have them?

Marine farming has always fought the not-in-my-backwater syndrome - opposition from coastal landowners, boaties and recreational fishers has slowed the spread of mussel and oyster farms since the 1970s. But they gained a foothold and the multimillion dollar success of greenlip mussel exports in the late-1990s led to a surge in applications for bigger farms.

Faced with this, the Government slapped a two-year moratorium on all new aquaculture applications and launched a review of outdated marine-farming legislation. The moratorium was supposed to give regional councils time to identify "aquaculture management areas" suitable for marine farming and bring control of the industry under one act, the Resource Management Act.

But the longer the reform process has gone on, the more tangled it has become.

"It started out as a small exercise to simplify the application process but it's snowballed into some very vexed discussions about ocean policy stuff," says Coates.

Plans to limit the tenure of farm licences horrified the industry. Who would invest in fish farming, which takes several years to earn a return, if it was all up for grabs a few years later? On the other hand, the concept of perpetual property rights over large chunks of coastal waters upsets those who see the sea as a public domain, including the Greens.

The latest fishhook is a Waitangi Tribunal report which found the proposals for aquaculture management areas breached four principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

The industry now fears that the reform bill, originally scheduled to be introduced last year, may not make the August Parliamentary deadline to become law in time for the lifting of the moratorium next March.

Coates says a backlog of three years of applications to the Ministry of Fisheries awaits the lifting of the moratorium and the new rules. He fears the selection of aquaculture areas by regional councils and subsequent appeals could push new farm production out five to eight years.

The Auckland Regional Council has received 1330 submissions on its proposed areas and nearly a third of submitters want to be heard at public hearings. Interest in the Firth of Thames is so high that it is being dealt with separately by the Auckland and Waikato councils, with consultation not due to finish until the end of the year.

The council's coastal resources manager, Hugh Leersnyder, says the industry's importance and potential is recognised but must be balanced with the needs of Auckland's significant boating and recreational fishing communities.

This week, the council voted to delay hearings until the Government's reform proposals are clearer.

Ministry of Fisheries deputy chief executive Stan Crothers says the reform bill is progressing and believes the latest proposals will ease concerns about tenure. After a tendering process, new farms can expect to gain resource consents renewable after 15 years.

The one remaining snag is potentially the biggest - the Waitangi Tribunal ruling which Crothers agrees has been unfairly portrayed as Maori wanting a bigger slice of fish.

"The fundamental approach is they want to know what the nature and extent of their rights are in the whole marine environment, which includes the seabed, the water column and foreshore. It's a very complex issue and not something which can be resolved in five minutes."

But Crothers, who chairs the reform's multi-party steering group, says policymakers still aim to table the legislation in Parliament by late August, so it can be enacted early next year.

Everyone in the industry hopes the deadline is met and that the new playing field is not too restrictive. As a biotech industry able to provide jobs in rural areas, it's exactly the kind of venture the Government should be encouraging, says Jeffs.

Last month, Niwa won a $1.4 million grant to further study new varieties including kingfish, grouper, kina, lobsters and eels. It is experimenting with sea sponges with anti-cancer and other medicinal properties.

Jeffs says it's vital that the industry diversifies to reduce dependence on salmon - vulnerable to over-supply - and shellfish, which can be wiped out by algal blooms.

"It's about us carving out a niche that's long-term, that's sustainable and which we make lots of money out of."

But our research and development funding for aquaculture lags well behind Australia, which is also encouraging investors with start-up grants and rates relief. While our industry reorganises, New Zealand firms are being lured across the Tasman.

One of the few regions actively encouraging aquaculture is Northland, which aims to increase earnings from $12 million to $100 million within 10 years and create 2000 new jobs. But the Peach Cove experience suggests the establishment of aquaculture management areas will be keenly fought.

Jeffs bristles at suggestions that the public doesn't want to see a visually and environmentally polluting industry spreading along our pristine shores.

"The reality is the coastline is far from pristine and is deteriorating all the time. [Agricultural] runoff has had incredible impacts on most harbours in Northland. But the environmental impact of oyster farming is just insignificant."

"I've no doubt there's room to increase aquaculture production along the coast and still maintain these other values."

He sees considerable irony in opposition to marine farming on grounds that toxins such as DDT, from land-based farming, have been found in salmon. The classic case here, he says, is the closure of oyster farms at Waikare Inlet in the Bay of Islands because of sewage pollution.

On the sustainability question, he says research breakthroughs will reduce the industry's dependence on wild fish stocks for feed. The world's first vegetarian salmon, raised entirely on plant matter, has just been unveiled in Scotland.