Visions of fish factory futures

Is this NorthCoast’s future?

Boosters see this as the holy grail.

To skeptics it looks like a vision of hell.

Boosters see: jobs and growth

Skeptics see pollution, disease, and a threat to wild fisheries and ecosystems

At the macro-level, we see ‘rural’ spaces being privatized into global economy.

Source: BC Coastal resources maps—

Each fish factory can be ID-ed using the ‘report’ option thus: Reference Number: 820.0 Name: Stolt Sea Farm Inc. Location: Wicklow Point, Broughton Island Capacity: 1295.0

New Economic Reality?? Wild salmon irrelevant

This is BC data 1999

Whose Values Count??

Factory salmon makes up nearly ½ the total value production at farm-gate / dock (before processing).

($302M vs wild of $311M)

Using this data—fish factories produced about 3x more tonnage as did all wild salmon fishery (latter includes low value chum, pinks)

Source data

Jobs & community stability

Sunset industry??

Source

(This data is before the Mifflin Plan buy back and weak Fraser river runs—it includes wild fisheries, mariculture and shoreworkers -- the jobs are computed as FTE full time equivalents)

BC’s Privatized Oceans

From this data, which is old, we can interpret that the number of jobs has remained but the shift is from fishing fleets to fish factory mariculture.

From small boat fleet to globalized factory worker?? (the data does not breakdown its ‘fishers’)

So Are these our future JOBS??

Source data

The mariculture growth as producer and employer using Stats Can data to 1996

Closer look at mariculture

While fish factories languished in the mid nineties they took off once the Salmon Review was over (as they did globally). While there was a moratorium on licenses and sites since 1995, the factories have doubled production by increasing stocking at each site,

Problems with disease, waste etc are perhaps a consequence of both the > density and the moratorium.

(note I have combined DFO and BC data)

Crunching the data

Graphs left look at the trends with output and value as per Full time Employee (FTE).

Because the employment data not provided after 1996 we can not see if the increased production led to more output per employee.

I would predict cost cutting measures, increased densities, and automation technology would reverse the trend left and see fewer jobs and more profit/ tonne.

Can relatively ‘green’ shellfish mariculture save us?

Two scales needed

In order to get the value of shellfish produced in Canada to show up on the graph I had to use a second scale with values 1/10^th those for finfish. $34.6M vs $394.9M totals.

So maybe five companies in PEI produce enuf mussels to make a blip on the chart ($15M)

Salmon grown in New Brunswick($112M) and BC (250M$) add up to 80% of the mariculture value in this Stats Can 1998 data

NATURE

Sea, land, river

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Regional

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