No government pork for salmon industry

Whether they are oil companies seeking a special tax break or major league baseball teams looking for a publicly financed stadium, corporations routinely make demands for government assistance. And they couple these demands with not-so-veiled threats of layoffs, factory relocations and other devastating consequences for workers and communities. The bigger the company, the greater the threat and, usually, the larger the public handout.

So it is distressing, but not surprising, to learn that the Maine salmon farming industry is using local jobs and the Maine environment as bargaining chips to extract as much federal money as possible to compensate for decreased sales caused by the outbreak of infectious salmon anemia (ISA).

First, some background. Many Maine residents know all too well by now that modern salmon farms are the marine equivalent of factory hog and chicken farms. A single factory fish farm may hold more than half a million fish crowded into moored, floating net pens; Cobscook Bay alone hosts more than 20 such farms.

Salmon factory farms release a variety of pollutants into the ocean, from toxic substances and antibiotics, to thousands of tons of concentrated fish wastes, to escaping farm-bred salmon themselves, which threaten to wipe out Maine’s endangered wild Atlantic salmon through competition, interbreeding and the spread of parasites and diseases like ISA.

When it comes to regulating this pollution, however, the salmon growers claim they are exempt from the federal laws that apply to all animal feedlot operations: not one salmon farm in Maine has ever obtained a waste discharge permit as required by the federal Clean Water Act.

But at the first sign of trouble for their own crop, these same companies now hypocritically demand federal assistance, claiming they are no different from other livestock operations. And they say if they don’t get a big enough slice of government pork, they will continue laying off workers and will not fallow their farm sites for a long enough time this winter to “flush out” the ISA disease. This is outrageous.

First, the fish farms brought this problem on themselves. The unnatural concentration of millions of fish in sea cages promotes disease and environmental degradation. ISA in particular has a long history at salmon farms, gradually spreading over the years from farms in Norway to those in Scotland, Canada and now Maine. By now, the industry knows how to minimize the risk of ISA.

But rather than fallow their farm sites regularly, reduce the dense concentration of fish in their pens, and institute well-known disinfection protocols to keep ISA out of Maine, the industry here buried its head in the ocean and made as much money as it could as fast as it could. Now these companies want the public to foot the bill for their own greed and short-sightedness.

Second, a government bailout is not what’s needed to save jobs in Downeast Maine. The Maine salmon industry is dominated by three multinationals: the Norwegian companies Stolt-Neilsen and Fjord Seafood and the Canadian company George Weston Ltd. These corporate leviathans don’t need government assistance to stay afloat. In fact, they’ve been gobbling up smaller salmon growers at a rate that indicates this business is highly profitable. Even now, in the midst of the ISA fiasco, the Dutch conglomerate Nutreco, the world’s largest salmon grower, is trying to buy George Weston’s farms.

If these companies really cared about Maine workers, they would have acted responsibly years ago to ward off ISA or they would use their immense resources now to protect their employees’ jobs. As state after state has discovered, corporations with no allegiance to their workers don’t change their stripes because of government subsidies.

Finally, the industry is shamelessly holding the Maine coastal environment hostage. It knows it must pull all its fish and its equipment from the water now, to stop the spread of ISA before it devastates the industry and wipes out the remaining wild salmon. But it is refusing to do so until it gets its government payoff.

If taxpayer money is to be spent here, it should be earmarked directly for the displaced workers who need it, and not poured down the insatiable gullets of the corporate salmon growers who created this mess.

Josh Kratka is a senior attorney with the National Environmental Law Center in Boston, which has filed lawsuits against the Maine salmon farming industry for violating the Clean Water Act. Matthew Davis is the New England Field Organizer for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which has approximately 1,000 members in Maine.