Farmed salmon industry eyes eco-friendly reform

BOSTON — Though fierce competitors in the marketplace, the world's leading salmon producers are now collaborating to make their industry more environmentally sustainable.

In what they hope will be a model for other fields, the industry's 14 largest producers, accounting for 70% of the world's yield, formed the Global Salmon Initiative to reduce their environmental footprint, improve their public image and meet exponential growth in demand. Tuesday, the initiative was presented for the first time in the United States, at the Seafood Expo North America held in Boston.

"We're pooling genius," said Avrim Lazar, a consultant who helped lead the effort.

By working together, the industry can find solutions that make sense at a global and industrial scale for problems such as parasites, escapes and sustainable sources of feed.

It just makes sense for these issues to be "precompetitive," Lazar said, because they undergird the whole industry.

A relatively small, consolidated field, salmon was a logical first place for such collaboration, said Jason Clay, a senior vice president with the World Wildlife Fund-US, who has been working on the effort for a decade.

The ultimate goal is to get other industries to follow suit, he said. Since announcing the Global Salmon Initiative late last summer, he said he's heard from shrimp, cocoa and palm oil producers looking for advice on how to form similar organizations.

"Where and how we produce food is the biggest threat to this planet," Clay told about 75 attendees at Tuesday's meeting. By 2050, he said, there will be a need to feed twice as many people as today.

Globally, aquaculture — or fish or shellfish farming — is now the same size as the wild fish industry and bigger than the beef industry, Clay said. Farmed salmon accounts for about 2 million tons of the 70 million tons of fish farmed globally, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Because it's a high-value fish, salmon accounts for a disproportionate percentage of earnings.

This winter, the nascent global salmon initiative had its first success. Salmon farms in Chile were getting inundated with sea lice, a type of parasite that sickens fish and reduces farming income. Initiative members who had successfully fought the parasite in Norway taught their colleagues how to handle the outbreak, and slowed it considerably, said Jon Hindar, CEO of Cermaq of Oslo. He said a single company could not have stopped the epidemic on its own. The parasites "tend to migrate, so you have to do the same treatment at the same time" across many farms, he said.

All agriculture pollutes to some degree, said Doris Soto, senior aquaculture officer with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. With this agreement, salmon producers have set themselves apart, she said.

"The industry is trying to face its problems, especially the environmental problems in a way that has perhaps not been done in agriculture," she said.

Tania Taranovski, sustainable seafood programs manager at the New England Aquarium in Boston, said the salmon industry definitely has had problems with its reputation in the past — sometimes deserved.

"We have seen a lot of improvement," she said. "We're very hopeful about the direction the industry is heading in. We hope to see the impacts of farmed salmon minimized to the extent possible."

Companies in the salmon initiative include Bakkafrost; Blumar Seafoods; Cermaq; Compañía Pesquera Camanchaca; Empresas AquaChile; Grieg Seafoods; Lerøy Seafood Group; Los Fiordos; Marine Harvest; Norway Royal Salmon; SalMar; Multiexport Foods; The Scottish Salmon Company; and Scottish Sea Farms.