Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)

My Lords, it is a pleasure to move this very modest and uncontroversial amendment, which would place a duty on the Crown Estate, in carrying out its functions under the Bill, to assess the environmental impact and animal welfare standards of salmon farms on the Crown Estate. If an assessment determines that a salmon farm is causing environmental damage or significant animal welfare issues, it must revoke the licence for the farm in question. If assessments of the potential environmental impact and animal welfare standards of applications for salmon farms on the Crown Estate determine that they may cause environmental damage or raise significant animal welfare issues of concern, the Crown Estate must refuse these applications. Who could be against that, except people running salmon farms that do not meet those conditions? I should begin by declaring an interest. I am a fisherman and my family own one week on the River Tay. I confess that I am absolutely bewitched by the glory of Atlantic salmon, which are now considered an endangered species alongside mountain gorillas and Siberian tigers. This is a really serious issue. The Crown Estate commissioners on both sides of the border—I regret that the Bill does not cover the commissioners’ activities north of the border because of devolution, but I am sure that if England sets the standard then others will follow—have a responsibility to protect the seabed, which was owned by the Crown and has been vested in the Crown commissioners for centuries. The monarch is not involved, but the commissioners should have a clear duty to protect the environment and nurture the ocean’s wildlife, particularly given the commitment to those ideals of members of the Royal Family, in whose name they act. I shall concentrate on the impact of farming Atlantic salmon, which has to be licensed by the Crown Estate. There are farming interests that have very high standards, but a wide variation of standards has been applied to salmon farming across the globe. All over the world, salmon farming has resulted in environmental damage to wild fish populations and threatened other species as a result of varying practices. Salmon are often concentrated in large numbers in open-net cages and flushed with chemicals and antibiotics to combat disease and lice—lice that literally eat the fish alive if not treated. The death rate in the cages is appalling and would never be allowed for conventional farming. Some 20 to 40% of those salmon die and are dumped. Imagine what people would say if they were going past fields of cows or sheep and finding those sorts of casualty levels—there would be an outcry. But of course all this is unseen because it is below the surface of the water. The list of various toxic chemicals that have been used to tackle lice includes organophosphates, which are highly dangerous, as we were often reminded by a former Member of this House. Other chemicals work by dissolving the bodies of the lice on the salmon, which are crustaceans. That results in the chemicals leaching into the sea and may very well explain why fishermen then start catching lobsters and crabs with half their shells dissolved. I urge anyone listening to this debate to look on YouTube at the horrific condition of salmon in some of these cages as a result of uncontrolled sea life predation. It is a horror movie that is widely available and very easily seen. The feed that these salmon are given is fishmeal pellets, to which further chemicals are added, including in some cases dioxins and PCBs. These are all controlled, but to present this as a sustainable environmentally-friendly product stretches credibility. Other chemicals are included in the feed in order to change the colour of the flesh. If you are a supermarket, rather like when you want to paint your house, you can get a colour code and choose in which shade of orange or red you would like the fish on your shelves to appear—perhaps, as a result, misleading the customers as to what it is they are buying. The importance of ensuring effective regulation and best practice hardly needs emphasising. The supply of pellets demands catching gargantuan quantities of small fish. Estimates vary, but those that I have seen are that between 3 and 5 kilograms of anchovies, sardines and other small pelagic fish are needed to produce just 1 kilogram of farmed salmon. That is a ratio, if you are being kind, of 3:1. To describe this as a sustainable business beggars belief. The scale is such that whole fishing communities have lost their livelihoods in west Africa, where the fish are taken by large vessels and turned into fishmeal, creating a lack of employment for local fishermen and a collapse in local economies. There is also irreversible damage being done to the seabed as fish faeces, chemicals and uneaten food fall through the cages. All that lands on the seabed, creating a disgusting, vile brew on an industrial scale. There are vast numbers of fish. Even in a small tank there will be 20,000 salmon, with up to 90,000 in the larger cages. Such high concentrations of salmon produce high concentrations of lice. These swarms of lice attach themselves to wild, migrating salmon, with fatal results. Escapees bring diseases to the wild population and whole rivers have been cleaned out of wild fish. Diseases include ISA—infectious salmon anaemia—and bacterial kidney disease. ISA is like AIDS for salmon but without any possible cure. There are many examples of how these viruses have been transmitted. In California, believe it or not, Atlantic salmon were being farmed using eggs transported from Norway. Those eggs contained the virus, which then took out the local population of Pacific salmon. Some in the industry are in denial. The truth is that, when the salmon farms arrive, it seems that the wild population crashes. Examples include the loss of the sea trout runs on the Scottish west coast and the once-great salmon rivers in Norway. In British Columbia, on the Broughton archipelago, the wild pink salmon population was reduced by 80% by sea lice that came from fish farming. In Chile, ISA—that virus I have just spoken of—resulted in the collapse of the entire industry. Iceland saw huge protests, with about 1% of the population turning up to protest outside the Parliament about the possibility of fish farms being allowed to continue. Wild fish interbreed, diluting the gene pool and reducing the ability of the progeny to make migratory journeys. This ability has been honed over hundreds of thousands of years by fish that are genetically unique to each river. They are breeding with the salmon from the farms. They are described as “Scottish salmon”. They are no more Scottish salmon than anything else. They are based on Norwegian salmon and are genetically modified to grow quickly. They are a million miles away in terms of their gene pool and structure from the fish that operate in the rivers of Scotland, each of which has a unique genetic identity and as a result is equipped to be able to run the river to spawn and to go out to sea and return after one or three years. If those fish interbreed with this alien species, the result is progeny incapable of making that journey and therefore the destruction of the population in the rivers concerned. And by the way, on the numbers escaping, in Loch Melfort in Scotland 48,000 fish escaped, dwarfing the wild population. There is a growing realisation around the world of the environmental damage being caused. This is resulting in complete bans on fish farms. Alaska has had a ban since 1990. Argentina has introduced a ban. California has introduced a ban in state waters. In British Columbia, the plan is to phase out open-net farms by 2025 and move to closed systems.