Salmon – and Salmond – heading for the crunch

In the middle of last month, the national press woke up to the long-simmering question of how salmon farms are damaging the survival chances of the revered traditional wild Scottish salmon. A strongly worded letter from Orri Vigfusson, chair of the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, accused Holyrood of systematic fish-farm mismanagement that was causing a catastrophic, rapidly increasing decline in wild stocks.

Alex Salmond, who is already proposing an independent review into the management of fish farms, is caught between a desire to satisfy the lucrative Chinese demand for sushi and the increasing fury of traditional anglers and high-quality producers, who have watched with dismay as the population of wild salmon dwindles.

There is no doubt that their accusation is justified. Anyone who has walked across the duckboards of a fish farm and seen the sluggish movement of big, over-fed fish with barely room to pass each other will know it is true. So will anyone who has seen binfuls of dead salmon carted away for disposal. Even without these insights, there can be hardly a living person now who does not know about the constant infestation of sea lice that demands massive use of toxic chemicals. Underwater footage shows only too clearly the build-up of excrement, surplus food and chemical dosage that spreads far along the seabed from the ‘footprint’ of a fish farm.

Mr Salmond has to understand that the only way out of this insoluble conflict is to rear caged salmon in a land-based system of linked tanks that have no direct connection to the sea and rivers in which wild salmon live their complex lives. There is no other way to avoid an ecological disaster that will in turn wreck Scotland’s most valuable export industry.