The current stench coming from the disease-ridden salmon farming industry is enough to turn the nose of Pepé Le Pew – but seemingly not Pew Environment Group who is embracing farmed salmon like a smitten kitten.
In an exclusive interview, Pew Environment Group’s Deputy Director Tom Wathen revealed that Pew is supporting the certification of farmed salmon via the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC).
“Pew supports the farmed salmon standards finalized by the Salmon Aquaculture Dialogue but we're keeping a low profile,” admitted Pew’s Tom Wathen in a phone call this week. “We felt that the standards were sufficiently strong to warrant Pew's support.”
“Pew ended up where we ended up,” continued Pew Environment Group’s Deputy Director. “I think if we get criticized for our support for farmed salmon then that's fair game.”
By supporting the Salmon Aquaculture Dialogue's standards, Pew dismissed the concerns of the 'Global Aquaculture Performance Index' which Pew itself funded via the Lenfest Ocean Program. In fact, the standards performed so badly that a report published in December 2011 ranked them not even close to a 'green' ranking!
The rotten decision to support farmed salmon was taken earlier this year by Pew Environment Group's Managing Director Joshua Reichert.
Pew’s Joshua Reichert is privately known by his colleagues as ‘The Seagull’ on account of his habit of swooping down on people’s projects and crapping on them.
How Pew came to support farmed salmon is a sordid tale involving dirty oil money, big industrial NGOs (so-called BINGOs) and corporate greenwashing.
Pew Environment Group is part of the Pew Charitable Trusts which claims to “work globally to establish pragmatic, science-based policies that protect our oceans.”
In fact, Pew owe their origins and $5 billion fortune to oil. Joseph Pew founded US oil company Sun Oil (now Sunoco) and Pew still has significant investments in Exxon Mobil, Chevron and other oil companies.
Read more via 'Can Pew's Charity Be Trusted?'
Pew's love affair with farmed salmon - which it has previously denounced as unsustainable and laden with cancer-causing contaminants - is a real heartbreaker.
Pew endorsed the final draft of WWF’s farmed salmon standards in February despite objections from the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform (CAAR) in British Columbia that is did “not adequately protect wild salmon and the environment”.
“Unfortunately, there are too many uncertainties to say it is strong enough to protect wild salmon or marine ecosystems and, for the CAAR groups, that is our bottom line,” commented Jay Ritchlin, Director of Marine Conservation at CAAR member group the David Suzuki Foundation, and a Steering Committee member of the Salmon Aquaculture Dialogue.
Pew still remains on the Steering Committee of the ‘Salmon Aquaculture Dialogue’ along with Marine Harvest, the Chilean salmon farmers association, the Norwegian salmon farmers association and the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance (which includes the BC Salmon Farmers Association). Earlier this month, CAAR broke off dialogue with Marine Harvest for failing to honour commitments via their ‘Framework for Dialogue’.
Pew’s support for farmed salmon leaves the so-called 'environmental' group out in the cold along with the much maligned World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Nevertheless, Pew’s support could prove crucial as the ASC seeks to certify farmed salmon as ‘responsible’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘environmental’.
Pew’s Hank Cauley is certainly well placed to ensure the certification of farmed salmon goes swimmingly – he sits on the ASC’s supervisory board. According to Pew's Tom Wathen, however: "Pew has no plans as an institution to come out in support of the ASC."
Yet by supporting the Salmon Aquaculture Dialogue standards, Pew has screwed the environment and shackled itself to the certification of farmed salmon by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council.
By supporting the final draft of WWF’s farmed salmon standards, Pew is effectively sanctioning the:
- use of toxic chemicals and pesticides
- untreated discharge of waste pollution
- the killing of marine mammals
- the spread of infectious diseases and parasites
- the unsustainable use of wild fish for feed
Read more via ‘The Abominable Salmon Council: Buyer Beware!’
Pew’s endorsement of the killing of marine mammals flies in the face animal welfare issues as well as the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act. In fact, a legal opinion sought by Pew’s Gerald Leape in 2005 stated that “the shooting of seals at salmon farm pens is clearly prohibited.” This legal opinion was cited in a formal complaint to the U.S. Department of Commerce filed by the Global Alliance Against Industrial Aquaculture in 2011.
Read more via ‘Salmon Farming Kills Marine Mammals’
The Pure Salmon Campaign (which included Pew as 'global partners') also campaigned against the killing of seals by Marine Harvest (a company Pew is now working with via the Salmon Aquaculture Dialogue).
Pew’s Managing Director Joshua Reichert also sits (rather uneasily given his support for the killing of marine mammals) on the board of directors of the Humane Society of the United States.
Pew’s support for salmon feedlots is all the more surprising given their ‘Reforming Industrial Animal Agriculture’ campaign against factory farming on land.
Pew’s shameful decision to support the certification of farmed salmon represents a slap in the face to all the scientific research Pew has funded over the decade. In fact, research supported by Pew has proved that salmon farming is not only unsustainable but farmed salmon is also contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals. Peer-reviewed scientific research funded by Pew has also shown that salmon farming kills wild salmon all around the world.
Pew funds the Lenfest Ocean Program which “supports scientific research aimed at forging solutions to the challenges facing the global marine environment”. Aquaculture projects funded by Pew’s science program include ‘Effects of Aquaculture Pens on Coastal Water Quality’, ‘Competition Between Catch of Forage Fish for Fishmeal and Human Consumption’ and ‘Evaluating the Impacts of Antibiotic Use in Chilean Salmon Aquaculture’.
Pew concedes that salmon farming is killing wild salmon and spreading infectious diseases.
“In Chile, up to 50 percent of salmon concentrated in aquaculture facilities die from infections linked to poor water quality and sanitation,” states one Pew-funded program. “Consequently, the aquaculture industry proactively adds antibiotics to the salmon feed each year, which passes into the water column and surrounding sediment through uneaten fish food and feces.”
In 2009, Pew also exposed the illegal use of chemicals on Chilean salmon farms by companies including the world’s largest, Marine Harvest.
Read more via ‘U.S. FDA Reports Show Unapproved Chemicals Used by Largest Chilean Salmon Farms’
Pew also hosted a screening of the film “Farmed Salmon Exposed” in Washington DC as part of the Pure Salmon Campaign’s ‘Global Week of Action’ in 2009. The film exposed the shameful practices of Norwegian companies operating in Chile, Canada, Scotland and Ireland.
“I've visited salmon farms, read scientific articles, and interviewed the multi-billion-dollar industry's advocates and detractors, but never have I encountered anything as graphic as the film Farmed Salmon Exposed by Canadian filmmaker Damien Gillis, which will be available online later this week as part of the Pure Salmon Campaign's Global Week of Action,” wrote food writer Barry Estabrook in The Atlantic. “Be warned, there are some extremely disturbing images in the clip, and the film in its entirety is positively gut-wrenching.”
Sadly, Pew pulled the plug on the Pure Salmon Campaign and their ‘Salmon Aquaculture Reform’ campaign in 2010.
Pew-funded research in 2008 found “a widespread negative impact of aquaculture farms on wild salmon survival.” Peer-reviewed research published in 2007 - funded via Pew’s ‘Marine Extinction Project’ – also found that “parasites from fish farms may drive some wild salmon populations towards local extinction.”
Another Pew-funded program publicly admits that: “Wastes and nutrients from fish pens may be altering the character of the surrounding ecosystems and potentially posing a hazard to human health.”
“As the aquaculture industry grows, so will the number of pens that create pollution,” said Professor Roz Naylor of Stanford University in 2011. “We discovered that the natural environment around fish pens can dramatically affect how far waste plumes travel from the source,” explained her Pew-funded colleague Jeffrey Koseff.
Pew concedes that salmon farming not only causes waste pollution and produces a contaminated product but also is inherently unsustainable. Pew’s forage fish program, for example, demonstrates that salmon farming is draining the oceans of wild fish and is quite literally stealing precious protein such as anchovies out of the mouths of hungry Africans and Latin Americans.
“The more farmed fish we produce, the less fish there is,” wrote Dr. Daniel Pauly of the Pew-funded ‘Sea Around Us’ project at the University of British Columbia in 2009. “This is akin to robbing Pedro to pay Paul.”
“We need fish meals not fishmeal,” said another Pew-funded researcher Dr. Patricia Majluf at the Seafood Summit in 2011. “Put simply – fish feed multinationals are stealing perfectly healthy food out of the mouths of Peruvians.” As Dr. Jennifer Jacquet from the University of British Columbia – another Pew-funded researcher - put it: “If you’re farming a predator you’ll always get less out than you put in.”
Read more via ‘Fighting for Fish Meals Not Fishmeal’
Moreover, the fishmeal and fish oil used for salmon farming is contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals. A Pew-funded study published in the journal Science in 2004 “found significantly higher levels of cancer-causing and other health-related contaminants in farm raised salmon than in their wild counterparts.”
“Farmed salmon should be consumed in limited amounts,” recommended the study authors which included Dr. Ronald Hites, Director of Indiana University’s Environmental Science Research Center. “Consumers should be aware that consumption of even one or two meals of farmed salmon per month may exceed acceptable contaminant levels.”
Other scientific studies have clearly shown that farmed salmon is an unhealthy choice for consumers.
How Pew can now support the Aquaculture Stewardship Council as a "credible consumer label" which will brand farmed salmon as a "responsible" choice for consumers is beyond reason. Promoting a product which contains cancer-causing contaminants and contributes to several metabolic disorders linked to diabetes and obesity is clearly irresponsible and a breach of public trust.
Pew’s decision to endorse the Aquaculture Stewardship Council in promoting farmed salmon as ‘responsible’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘environmental’ is nauseating and difficult to swallow.
Pew’s U-turn on farmed salmon means the organization is now careering headlong into a public relations car wreck.
Pew’s CEO Rebecca Rimel and Joshua Reichert won’t be smiling as Pew's name is dragged through the mud.
Pew’s CEO Rebecca Rimel has faced her fair share of criticism. According to Vivian Krause, a former employee of fish feed giant Nutreco (a former owner of Marine Harvest):
Pew’s CEO replied:
Why Pew is now ignoring their own science and backing salmon farming is unreasonable. Rebecca Rimel, however, is not a person to argue with.
“There's a word for people like Rebecca W. Rimel (especially when it's used, and pronounced, the way the French apply it to a certain kind of woman): formidable,” reported The Wall Street Journal in 2007.
“Ms. Rimel, 55, has led the Pew Charitable Trusts since 1994. With some $5.2 billion in assets, the Pew, a legacy of the family that started Sun Oil, expects to disburse almost $250 million this fiscal year. By any standard, it would be a heavyweight in the foundation world, except that the Pew is no longer a grant-giving foundation. In 2004, it transformed itself into a public charity, putting itself into the program business, enabling it to spend sizable sums on lobbying, and enhancing its power.”
Pew's support for PCB-contaminated farmed salmon may therefore represent another power play. But truth be told, the people don't want 'sustainable' and 'responsible' farmed salmon rammed down their throats. Full stop. Period. End of story. That's all folks!
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