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The future growth of this industry will be on land and it appears that, worldwide, the smart money knows this. Currently, 250,000 metric tonnes of land-based production are planned and this number has doubled over the past year. One land-based farm under construction in Florida will produce more than B.C.’s total current output.

Driven by rising feed prices and the cost of controlling sea lice and disease, the same multinationals that are farming in B.C. waters with net-pens are elsewhere exploring contained systems. In Norway and Europe, support for containment solutions is high, with research funding, government loan guarantees and incentive pricing for ‘green’ salmon farms combining to help fuel a transition to land.

Today in B.C., our wild salmon and ecosystems absorb the cost of industry’s failure to control parasitic lice and disease. Repeated infestations of lice have been shown to reduce productivity of both wild pink and coho salmon populations in the Broughton Archipelago and sadly, the same may be happening now in Clayoquot Sound. The latest scientific papers show that viruses originating on the farms can cause disease in wild Pacific species. And when farmed salmon escape, parasites and diseases are carried into the natal streams of wild salmon.

Last month, Washington State elected to phase out open net-pens, prompted by the threat posed by escaped salmon. This leaves B.C. as the only place in the world trying to manage commercially viable Pacific salmon fisheries and an open-net pen industry of Atlantic salmon, in the same water. Everywhere that the net-pen industry exists it leaves a legacy of plummeting stocks of wild salmonids. As we enter yet another season of wild salmon scarcity, with even some of our mighty Fraser River stocks on the endangered list, how can we fail to take action?