CHAPTER 1CONSOLIDATING THE FORCES
Every summer, Gulfstreams, Boeings, and Bombardiers crowd the tarmac of the single-runway airport in Alta, a town on the northern coast of Norway. The private jets bring business tycoons, celebrities, and royalty to the Land of the Midnight Sun so they can cast a fly into the fabled Alta River, regarded by aficionados as one of the best remaining salmon rivers in the world. People wealthy enough to own hundred-million-dollar airplanes think nothing of paying ten thousand dollars a day for the chance to catch and release a twenty-pound wild Atlantic salmon. Mere mortals take their chances in a lottery for day licenses that cost around four hundred dollars.
For three days in July 2007, a private helicopter was parked alongside the jets. It belonged to billionaire John Fredriksen, the sixty-three-year-old son of a welder who grew up near the port in Oslo, left school at sixteen, and came to own the world’s largest fleet of oil tankers. Over the decades, Fredriksen had built a ten-billion-dollar empire in oil tankers and global shipping. His holdings made him Norway’s richest man—except that by 2007, he was no longer Norwegian. A year earlier, Fredriksen had relinquished his citizenship to become a subject of Cyprus, where taxes were far lower. Still, he returned regularly to cast his fly in the waters of the Alta in search of salmon befitting a master of the universe.
After three days on the river with his buddies, Fredriksen was contemplative as he prepared to board his helicopter. Rune Ostlyngen, a reporter for the local newspaper Altaposten, buttonholed him at the airport and asked about the contradiction of fly-fishing for wild salmon while owning salmon farms contributing to their demise. Fredriksen’s response was surprising: “I am worried about the future of wild salmon. Fish farming should not be allowed in fjords where wild salmon are present in local rivers. What is happening here in fjords is not good.”
Fredriksen’s words resounded through the industry and among conservationists. A year earlier, he had acquired control of Marine Harvest, the largest salmon farmer in a fragmented industry. The company, which was later renamed Mowi, operated open-net salmon farms in countries ranging from Norway and Scotland to Canada and the United States. Many of those farms were along the migratory paths of wild salmon and adjacent to sensitive breeding grounds for lobster, crab, and other marine life. The spread of disease and escaped farmed salmon pose serious threats to the declining population of wild salmon on the Alta River and every other place where farms are located near migration paths.
Fredriksen could not have predicted the response to his spontaneous expression of support for moving salmon farms away from salmon rivers. A wave of hope spread through the passionate corps of people desperate to save the world’s wild salmon. Conservationists, environmentalists, and anglers alike greeted his comment with unbridled optimism. Thirty-three conservation groups from six countries wrote a letter praising Fredriksen for what they interpreted as a promise to move his farms out of sensitive waters. Politicians and fishing associations in the United States, Canada, Scotland, and Norway heaped accolades on him. “Mr. Fredriksen’s call to move salmon farms hopefully comes just in time to save wild Atlantic salmon populations in the whole of Norway,” said Sven-Helge Pedersen, a wild salmon advocate from a region of Norway where the fish were disappearing from every river.
They should have saved their breaths.
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Historians trace the first fish farms to China as early as 3000 BC, when carp were trapped and kept in ponds. Around 475 BC, a Chinese historian named Fan Lai wrote an instructional book called The Classic of Fish Culture, the first written record of aquaculture practices. The history of modern salmon farming, however, is relatively brief. In 1733, a German fish farmer successfully fertilized fish eggs to cultivate fish, the beginning of modern aquaculture. For the next two centuries, fishermen in Northern Europe and Scotland maintained small salmon pens for local markets. But the practice of raising just a few hundred salmon in a pen would be extinguished by the industrialization of food production.
Conflicting stories are told about how commercial salmon farming got its start. The consensus is that Norwegians were at the forefront, but exactly which Norwegians is debated. There is general agreement that Jay Laurence Lush, an American animal geneticist regarded as the father of livestock breeding, provided the road map that led to the faster-growing, domesticated version of salmon that is now the industry standard. In 1963, Lush was teaching at Iowa State University when he met a young graduate student from Norway named Trygve Gjedrem. Captivated by Lush’s theory, the Norwegian returned home and applied Lush’s breeding principles to fish farming in 1971.
At about the same time, Thor Mowinckel was floating rudimentary salmon pens in the sea along Norway’s western coast. His first attempt was a total loss when a storm wiped out the pens and the salmon escaped. He moved the pens to a protected inlet about a mile away and started over. In 1971, Mowinckel harvested sixty metric tons of salmon, enough that most industry historians credit him with officially starting the commercial salmon-farming business.
Mowinckel named his company Mowi. In the years that followed, Mowi produced half of all the farmed salmon in Norway. After a merger, the company was renamed Hydro Seafood, and it shifted its headquarters to Bergen, the closest big city. Surrounded by mountains and fjords, Bergen would emerge as the home of salmon farming, as companies based there came to dominate the growing global market.
In those early years, Hydro Seafood and its competitors located their salmon pens in hundreds of deep, cold inlets along Norway’s southwestern coast. As the numbers of salmon in individual pens increased, the farmers found that the inlets did not provide enough water flow to keep the crowded cages clean and the fish free of parasites. The turning point came in 1987.
Hydro Seafood’s pens had attracted infestations of sea lice, tiny oval crustaceans that attach themselves to salmon and feed off the mucous, blood, and thin skin of the fish. Though smaller than a fingernail, these parasites can literally eat a fish alive. Sea lice occur naturally in the wild but pose a limited danger. Wild salmon are constantly moving, and the rush of water knocks off most lice. Also, wild salmon weakened by lice become easy prey for predators, which minimizes the spread of lice to other fish and keeps the numbers of lice low.
What Hydro Seafood discovered was that thousands of salmon jammed into cages attracted high concentrations of sea lice. Swarms of parasites attacked farmed salmon, and the sickened fish died and sank to the bottom of the cages, steadily increasing the concentration of lice. Hydro Seafood, and eventually other big farmers, tried to solve the problem by moving their cages farther from the shore. The hope was that the stronger tides would sweep away the parasites, or at least reduce their numbers to a manageable size. It did not work, and as the industry has grown, so has the damage inflicted by sea lice.
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When Fredriksen arrived on the scene, twenty or so medium-size companies were producing most of the world’s farmed Atlantic salmon, and consolidation was just getting underway. Small farmers still existed, but they were struggling. As Fredriksen acquired more companies, he changed the industry forever, accelerating consolidation, paving the way for a small number of multinational companies to control salmon farming and, ultimately, creating greater environmental problems.
Dissecting the early deals can be dizzying, but think of big fish eating little fish. In a series of multimillion-dollar transactions, Fredriksen gained control of Marine Harvest, a collection of companies that included the successor to Thor Mowinckel’s Mowi. Fredriksen had no experience in aquaculture, but he understood the value of concentrating production and power. With the acquisition of Marine Harvest in 2006, he was poised to become the major player in salmon farming. At the time, the company was based in the Netherlands, and the Norwegian press greeted Fredriksen as a national hero when he brought the headquarters home to Bergen. Norway dominated salmon farming. Its biggest advantage was geographic: the natural conditions that exist along its more than fifty thousand miles of coastline provided deep, cold waters. Another factor, however, was the cooperation among the government, scientists, and industry in providing support that turned salmon into Norway’s second-largest export (after oil) and a point of national pride.
One of Fredriksen’s rare setbacks occurred in 2013. Eager to solidify Marine Harvest’s dominance, he launched an unsolicited bid for Cermaq, a salmon-farming company controlled by the Norwegian government and ranked third in size behind Marine Harvest and another Norwegian company, Leroy Seafood Group. Fredriksen was determined to control the market for farmed salmon the way he had for oil tankers. Cermaq was a good fit because it had significant operations in Chile, a place where Marine Harvest had no presence.
The government rejected the offer as too low, and the Oslo stock market reacted by sending Cermaq’s stock higher. Fredriksen had put Cermaq in play, but he eventually lost out to Mitsubishi Corporation, part of the giant Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Group. Mitsubishi already dominated the global tuna-fishing industry, and with farmed salmon rising in popularity in Japan and elsewhere, its executives saw Cermaq as a means of expanding its holdings in Chile and gaining a foothold in Canada, where Cermaq also operated salmon farms.
Fredriksen’s star was also dimming among environmentalists, who eventually understood that he had no intention of protecting wild salmon in Norway or anywhere else. He’d said that salmon farms shouldn’t be allowed near wild salmon, but given that it was allowed, you did not need a crystal ball to know that the voracious tycoon was not going to put fish welfare ahead of profits. Today, Mowi, the successor to Marine Harvest, owns farms everywhere wild salmon struggle to survive. The number and size of the farms have grown, the number of salmon crammed into each pen has risen, and concerns about the impact on the environment, the well-being of the fish, and the health risks of eating farmed salmon have increased, too.
Rather than opening the door to a new way of doing business by protecting wild salmon and the environment, the consolidation sparked by Fredriksen changed everything. Open-net salmon farming might have had minimal impact on the environment and the fate of wild salmon if it had continued at a small scale. But the big companies bought up the little operations and turned them into industrial-scale feedlots. Fredriksen did not start the trend, but he accelerated the mutation of a noble fish into a domesticated commodity no different from the oil carried by his fleet of tankers. Open-net salmon farms spread from the major producers, such as Norway, Chile, Scotland, and Canada, to include smaller operations in Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, New Zealand, and Tasmania.
Growing at a breakneck pace, salmon farming became a high-yield, high-profit part of the global industrial food chain. While consumers saw the price of salmon in restaurants and markets going down, the biggest beneficiaries were the industry’s biggest owners. Buoyed by the low cost of starting farms, and supported by handouts from governments eager for jobs, the big salmon companies were earning huge sums providing a product widely accepted as sustainable and healthy.
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The result of consolidation is a dystopian vision. Like factory farms invented in the 1960s for beef, chickens, and pigs, today’s salmon farms are designed to raise fish quickly, cheaply, and with minimal capital investment. Overcrowded pens and overused antibiotics and chemicals in beef and pig feedlots have led to reforms. Similar concerns about global salmon farming have been largely ignored by the industry, government regulators, and people who eat farmed salmon. The main reason for the difference is that the manure and muck of a feedlot for cattle and pigs are easily visible, but the crowded cages and environmental degradation caused by salmon farms are unseen, below the waterline.
Today, aquaculture is the world’s fastest-growing food-production system. At its most basic, the practice involves raising fish, shrimp, and mussels in cages, ponds, streams, and pens on the ocean. In the last thirty years or so, aquaculture has contributed to the rise in human consumption of fish and has developed a range of species that can be farmed efficiently and sustainably because their diet consists of plants and grains.
Still, there are downsides, ranging from pollution to the overuse of antibiotics and chemicals that often find their way into the human food chain. When it comes to farming salmon, the negatives are greater than the positives. Salmon are carnivores; feeding them smaller fish contributes to pillaging the oceans and deprives people in lower-income countries of food essential to their survival. Salmon farms also spread diseases to wild fish and pollute waters with excess feed and waste.
Think of a salmon farm as an iceberg: you can see only about 10 percent of it on the surface. Unlike the majestic beauty of an iceberg, though, an open-net salmon farm is ugly on the surface and worse below the waterline, where fish are confined in mesh cages that are often choked with mussels, seaweed, and other growth. Below these pens, the seafloor is fetid with feces, chemical residue, and parasites. It is a study in environmental degradation.
Nine out of ten Atlantic salmon are produced in these open-net pens floating in bays and coves along coastlines. A single salmon farm generally contains ten to twelve cages, also called pens or net pens. The cages are spread across an area slightly wider and longer than a football field. Each cage can contain up to one hundred thousand fish, meaning a farm can have a million salmon. The cages are arrayed side by side and suspended by floatation devices. A small barge attached to the farm contains a generator to keep the lights on at night and to power the automated feeding machines. Nets are made of nylon mesh arranged in a tight grid pattern designed to keep the fish inside and keep out predators like tuna, sharks, and whales. The nets are anchored to the seabed by mooring cables. In addition, mesh nets cover the pens to keep birds away when the salmon are young. Cages can be square or rectangular, but most are circular, roughly ninety-five feet in diameter and thirty-three feet deep. Below the surface, the mooring lines must be long enough to allow the cages to move with the current and tides, extending the boundaries of the farm. Buoys mark the outer perimeter of the farm, which can cover as much as one hundred acres, and fishing boats and other craft are prohibited from entry.
After the eggs are fertilized and the young salmon are raised in hatcheries on land, they move to the ocean pens and spend two years or longer maturing in cages. Automated arms feed the fish a diet of a fish meal made from wild-caught fish and grains ground into pellets often laced with antibiotics and chemicals. No barrier exists to prevent the discharge of waste, excess feed, parasites, or chemicals into the surrounding water. Farms are usually clustered within a few hundred yards of shore, in sheltered coves to protect them from stormy seas and to allow workers easy access by boat. Ideally, these locations are designed to take advantage of ocean currents that flow through the open nets, providing oxygen and dispersing waste from excess feed, excrement, and chemicals. But they are more like sewers. The water tends to be shallow, with weaker currents and lower rates of water exchange, allowing waste and effluent to build up along wild salmon migration routes and near sensitive breeding and feeding grounds for sea creatures like lobsters, crabs, and scallops.
Tucked along the fjords of Norway or the coves of Puget Sound, the farms appear benign from the surface. Salmon can be seen swimming in circles, occasionally leaping out of the water. Beneath the waterline is a different story. Scuba divers who maintain the pens say that the nets can become clogged by mussels and other marine life, making them almost impenetrable. In videos, the clogging—known as biofouling—is so dense that the nets essentially become walls, impeding the flow of water and leaving pens murky with excrement, food waste, and decaying fish. Sharks and tuna sometimes breach the netting in search of food, only to be killed by divers with handmade spears or workers on the rigs with shotguns. Those carcasses are dumped into the ocean, often in violation of government regulations.
The ability to discharge freely into the water allows salmon farmers to avoid costly waste treatment. Those savings are part of the allure of open-net salmon farming for investors. Initial investments and operating costs for ocean-based facilities are low. Profit margins can exceed 50 percent. But those corporations are freeloaders. The real costs, paid by society, are much higher. Leases for public land (that is, the ocean floor below the farms itself) are inexpensive. In many places, taxpayer-financed government subsidies encourage expansion and, when things go wrong, cushion the industry from losses. The world supply of Atlantic salmon has increased nearly 500 percent since 1995, reaching nearly 2.6 million metric tons in 2020. (One metric ton is equal to 2,204 pounds.) Demand has remained strong because the fish seems cheap and because experts praise its health benefits. From a business perspective, salmon farming has surpassed all predictions.
The allure is simple, and simply wrong. Salmon farming is part of an industrial food chain with enormous hidden costs that range from damaging the environment and threatening wild salmon to saturating the market with fish whose flesh contains higher concentrations of toxins and cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) than that of wild salmon. The industry’s growth has led to overfishing of sardines, herring, anchovies, and other small fish used in feed, taking marine resources away from subsistence fishers in low-income countries along the coast of West Africa and diminishing the staples of local diets. The salmon-farming industry has made limited progress in replacing fish meal and fish oil with alternative protein sources like plants and insects, but rising demand for salmon has maintained pressure on the fish down the food chain. People who eat farmed salmon are literally taking food from the mouths of the less fortunate.
As global demand for salmon grew and industry consolidation continued, farms became larger and more crowded. The jammed cages reflected the industry’s axiom: The more fish you grow, the more money you make. The common industry response to criticism about overcrowding is that salmon like to congregate. Marine biologists, however, say wild salmon swim in large schools only to ward off predators by appearing to be a single, larger fish.
Greater density in cages translated into greater parasite problems, creating what has been called “sea lice soup.” Salmon have been found with hundreds of these parasites eating away skin and flesh. One biologist counted 747 lice on a single fish. The lice can be so numerous that at some fish-processing plants, workers use Shop-Vacs to remove them from incoming salmon. Large numbers of lice on a salmon cause loss of fins, scarring, open lesions, secondary infections, and, in some cases, death. Badly scarred fish are less marketable, though some show up in stores. A wide-ranging analysis of the costs of salmon farming by Just Economics, a research organization in London, estimated that the ten largest companies have spent between $3.5 billion and $4 billion combating sea lice since 2013 and that lice caused 30 percent of farmed-salmon mortalities.
For the companies, dead salmon are a cost of doing business, tallied in antiseptic terms like biomass. From a humane perspective, the numbers are staggering. An average of 15 to 20 percent of farmed salmon die every year before harvest—about 150,000 dead salmon at each farm every year, roughly 100 million worldwide. Catastrophic losses have become so common that the industry has a name for them: “mortality events.” In 2019, a die-off at ten farms owned by a subsidiary of Mowi in Newfoundland, Canada, killed as many as 3 million salmon and littered beaches with rotting fish for miles. Similar die-offs occur regularly at salmon farms worldwide.
The danger of sea lice concentrations extends beyond the cages, threatening wild salmon and other sea life in the vicinity. The most vulnerable are migratory juvenile wild salmon, called smolts. Salmon are born in rivers, where they live for one to three years. From late spring until early summer, the smolts migrate to salt water and the ocean. The smolts are still small when they begin their journey, three to six inches long, and their scales and skin are soft. On the way to the ocean, the smolts often must pass by farmed-salmon cages. The timing is bad because sea lice are shedding larvae in the same months, creating a gauntlet of millions of microscopic lice for the smolts to navigate. Even a few lice can prove fatal to a young smolt.
The dramatic expansion of salmon farming has led to another problem: escapees. Countless studies have shown that escaped farmed salmon pose a major threat to the declining population of wild salmon. They compete for food and interbreed to produce hybrids that are less able to survive in the wild. The twin threats of sea lice and interbreeding are why conservationists were momentarily buoyed by Fredriksen’s comments in the summer of 2007 and let down when it became apparent that he had no intention of moving his farms.
The salmon-farming practices that have come with consolidation and skyrocketing growth impose a high cost not just to the environment, but also to the world economy. The 2021 analysis by Just Economics, called Dead Loss: The High Cost of Poor Salmon Farming Practices, concluded that, since 2013, poor salmon-farming practices have cost the global economy $47 billion in damage to marine ecosystems through pollution, the spread of disease and parasites, and the high mortality rates of fish in cages. Focusing on the four major salmon-farming countries of Canada, Chile, Norway, and Scotland, the assessment found that fish mortality had increased dramatically and so had the cost of treating salmon for sea lice and other diseases. According to Just Economics, Mowi alone lost fifty million salmon between 2010 and 2019, at a cost of $1.7 billion.
Copyright © 2022 by Douglas Frantz and Catherine CollinsAll rights reserved.
