Growing seafood demand has pushed the government of Canada to develop salmon-aquaculture industry at the cost of others. The government has announced many schemes for the development of the industry. It is said that salmon farming need harvesting of wild fish such as sardines, whiting, and anchovies for fishmeal and fish oil is required to produce the feed.
According to a report of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea the deep-sea fish in the North Atlantic are being fished at more than twice the rate they can withstand to provide food for farmed salmon. The report says the ecology of farming carnivore fish such as salmon and the impacts it has on natural food webs. It is observed that salmon farming requires minimum four kilograms of wild fish to produce one kilogram of farmed fish.
In this way salmon farming is hurting more than helping the global fishery problem. Leading fish expert Daniel Pauly of the UBC Fisheries Centre has wanred gainst farning up the food web because it is inefficient and a wasteful use of biological resources, all of which are already used by humans and other organisms, and some of which are commercially valuable.
Ecologists Corey Peet points out that more than 85 percent of the world’s aquaculture production (primarily in Asia) involves the use of non-carnivorous species (freshwater fish, shellfish, and seaweed. It is found that the salmon-aquaculture industry is totally running after short-term economic motives and thus ignoring the lost that it is making during farming.
