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Submitter: Nancy Westwood
Community: Parksville
Date Submitted: August 30, 2011
Summary:
Fish farms, like any other industrial farm, need to contain and treat effluent. Those who covered up evidence of a virus need to be reprimanded in serious ways.
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Submission:
After reviewing the Miller evidence released this week, when only after public outcry the compilation of data was released, it shows a direct correlation to Sockeye decline and salmon farms' documented "anemia". The solution to the issue to protect wild salmon is SO simple, although increased capital expenditure appears to be the hurdle and alot of lying and cover up has occured so that the farming corporations' profits are protected; all to the detriment of our wildsalmon stock.
Every other industry has effluent regulation into the ocean. Please! Get the farms on shore, in Tanks and out of the ocean. The farms, like any other industrial farm, need to contain and treat effluent. Ocean farmed salmon has done too much damage in the name of profit for shareholders. It's a false profit when the entire industry was built on low start up costs with ocean pens,wrongly allowing alien species being penned in nets open to the ocean, allowing the spread sea lice, of infection and viruses, the escape of those alien species to mix with wild stock, and the expending of raw effluent from these industrial farms into pristine and rich wild salmon stock sites and worse of all that we k ow of "so far", infecting our wild stock with a deadly virus.
Parts that have gone unmentioned are that large areas under and surrounding the pens on the sea floor, which used to be rich in marine life is a dead mass of low pH area covered with sludge and bacteria, not much different than an effluent clarifier gone septic. Is this issue being discussed in this inquiry?
The people, individuals from both government and industry, who covered this virus up need to lose their professional status, be charged or reprimanded in some way that sets a Precidence! And sends a strong, clear statement to industry and government that the wild salmon survival is first before their profit, share value, corporate direction, investment, kickback or tax gain. Those in government who have to date, put farmed salmon as the primary mandate second to wild stock, have proven themselves negligent and incompetent and should be removed from their positions permanently.
The only logical solution is farmed salmon pens need to be on shore with effluent treatment - it's feasible. This saves the wild stock and that - is priceless.
Sincerely,
Nancy Westwood |
