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| Both bears and orca's depend on wild salmon GETTY |
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444,
retired
GED HEO
7-08-21
I like to eat Salmon, not least for its meaty texture and flavor but most
importantly as a heart attack victim, the omega 3 fatty acids it contains. It
is one of the healthiest fish to eat after mackerel and sardines.
I stay clear of the farmed salmon (or thought I did) as I have heard some pretty bad stories about aquaculture. I pride myself in refusing to buy anything but wild caught. But having that name doesn’t mean the “wild caught” salmon is a not a hatcheries product apparently.
I decided to probe a little further and what I found is alarming indeed. In the early days of the later 1960’s, aquaculture of salmon and their relatives like trout, amounted to about 400,000 tons a year. By 2018, that figure reached 3 million tons and 2.6 million of that was the product of fish farms. Today, most fish farming is marine based and this acuaculture, as it is called, supplies the majority of the fish we eat.
Fish farming is an expensive though. It is also a “technically difficult” operation that has some severe environmental side effects. The sea-based farms are basically, “…hundreds of thousands of carnivorous salmon caged in open-net pens suspended in the ocean…” according to BusinessWeek ( Fixing Fish Farming: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 6-21-21).
The environmental hazards of this method are disturbing, Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, warns that, “You have under the cage, one meter—three feet or more—composed of fecal matter and rotting food, and that is the most disgusting thing you can imagine, and sometimes that stuff, in a storm, gets stirred up and kills all the fish.” This putrid mass is left in the water and when the pollution becomes so bad, the pens move on and repeat the process. Fish escape, and breed with wild salmon degrading the genetic makeup of the wild fish and much like the land based industrial pig and chicken farms, disease is rampant.
The truth is that hatcheries and fish farming of salmon are a response to the incompatibility of capitalist production with human existence and the natural world. Environmental changes, reduction of habitat through market driven human developments such as housing and agriculture and the damming of rivers in particular, has had a savage effect on the salmon population with 40% of salmon extinct in their historical range. Fish farms are supposed to counter this declining population. But farmed fish can escape from the pens and breed with wild salmon, weakening the gene pool as well as spread diseases and fish lice that is a rampant problem with so many fish confined to such a small space. They also enter streams and spawning grounds increasing competition for food. So as the total population of salmon increases due to farming, the population of wild, or real salmon if you like, is decreasing and heading rapidly towards extinction. In other words, engineered salmon are killing the natural variety.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek being what it is, a theoretical journal dedicated to capitalism and the so-called free market, is touting new technology at marine farms and more land based farms as the solution. The farms try to “mimic” the process in the natural world that make salmon what they are but are very expensive, require a lot of energy and technology and need to have some semblance of environmental sustainability.
It’s a risky proposition for the investors that want to profit from this industry. Within the confines of capitalism and the free market there is no way the extinction of the wild salmon can be avoided. Business Week makes it very clear in the two examples of innovative companies the goal of the fish farming industry, “Both are on the verge of doing something long considered almost impossible: turning a profit raising a premium Atlantic salmon that’s never touched the sea.” There’s you have it, fish farms are not about food, they are about profits.
There’s useful information in the BusinessWeek article so it’s worth reading and this article in Forbes has useful information in it. It mentions the documentary titled Artifishal, The Fight to Save Wild Salmon and I watched it.
The problem with the Artifishal, as well as the articles in BusinessWeek and Forbes is that the goal is to find a solution to this crisis and all social crises including hunger, poverty and above all, climate catastrophe, within the framework of capitalism. An example at the end of Artifishal is some legislation that is passed ending hatchery construction in one particular area. But this will not “Fix” fish farming as Business Week hopes and fish farming needs ending not fixing. Regulation of industry has not halted oil spills, factory disasters, pollution and so on. While Artifishal is choc full of information and decries irresponsible capitalism, it is produced by Patagonia, a trendy clothing company who’s clothes most workers can’t afford made in Asian factories. Patagonia was by founded by billionaire Yvon Chouinard. It is in his interests to argue there is a nicer friendlier capitalism, he didn’t become a billionaire working overtime.
Donald Wesley, a chief of the Ditwilgyoots tribe in British Columbia tells Business Week that the only solution that will work is to restore the wild salmon population so it can be fished responsibly. This is a simple and correct answer. We don’t need fish hatcheries or fish farms any more than we need auto factories to run 24 hours a day seven days a week all year round. But this road will not be taken because capitalism is not a responsible system of production; it is not aimed at providing social, needs for society as a whole.
Capitalist production is set in motion if there is a significant chance of profiting from the investment, of lining the pocket of the owners of capital. Industry has become so efficient it is too productive. so factories lie idle, and capital, wealth created by labor through the labor process flows in to speculative ventures and ridiculous projects like giving other billionaires rides in to space.
As Michael Roberts, the Marxist economist drives home, profitability is the driver in our system and that will not change.
All the stop gap measures will fail. I think most people understand that in a way. The problem is how can the alternative come about? How can we fight big money, city hall and so on? I think this is the main issue in people’s minds; there’s no way out and that’s why documentaries like Artifishal can be so depressing; it doesn’t have a way out. As good as it is, we’ve heard it all before.
The first point is that capitalism will force humanity to respond, to defend ourselves in the face of the ending of life as we know it. Necessity is the mother of invention as they say. In struggle we learn things, we draw conclusion about the world around us. Secondly, we have to overcome the “stop in the mind”. The English historian Christopher Hill wrote of the heroic figures, both secular and religious, that fought against the feudal aristocracy and this regime at the time of the English Revolution in the mid 17th century. Bravery and the desire for change was there, but the dominant ideology in society was the philosophy of “Divine Right” that the king was king by God’s will. He was “God’s” representative on earth. I assure the reader that this view did not arise from the head of the peasant or serf whose bride the feudal lord had the pleasure of on their wedding night.
Accepting this view in one’s own mind was an obstacle that prevented heroic figures from going too far, from going beyond reforms accepted by the King. But along came Cromwell who suggested they cut off the king’s head and see what happens. A new day was born and old myths shattered. (simplified version).
Our own consciousness is in many ways an obstacle to change. We are inundated with propaganda from academia and the intelligentsia that gives intellectual credibility to an exploitative and destructive system. Mass education, universities, the pulpit and the capitalist mass media defend the system as it is and that is permanent, it is for all time. All ruling classes and their mouthpieces do this. Francis Fukuyama claimed that capitalism was the highest form of human civilization; something objective reality has forced him to question. We have to question a reality imposed on us from without.
To do this, working people have to take a break from the distractions of sports, sex, religion and fantasy (we don’t eliminate them we de-commodify them) and learn about the true history, history from below, history of our own kind, the ruled not the rulers; the exploited not the exploited. We will see that human history has many failed and extinct civilizations. We must understand for ourselves what the US Civil War was actually about, the English revolution, the colonial struggles and why the Spanish Revolution failed and the Russian Revolution, that overthrew landlordism and capitalism degenerated in to a monstrous dictatorship. What is China? It certainly isn’t communism. What are the underlining forces in these events. And we must study our present system, the capitalism system. How it works, why it doesn’t work and why it goes in to crisis every 10 or so years.
No social system is permanent and human history is a process. The difference today is that capitalism has the ability to destroy human civilization entirely through environmental destruction or nuclear annihilation. Capitalism cannot prevent that, it is the driver of it.
If working people, the hundreds of millions of us that rely on the land or the wages system as our mean of survival choose to, we can change our consciousness and we can change the world.
Then we’ll see the wild salmon triumphant again.
(1) Fixing Fish Farming: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 6-21-21
How Salmon Became The Symbol Of Our Broken Food System
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