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saveseilsound campaigner Ewan Kennedy has just reported watching the first few minutes of the RACCE [Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment] committee on live stream.
First he saw an amendment from Jayne Baxter MSP – requiring regard to be paid to impacts of sea lice on wild salmon – rejected by 5 votes to 4.
However, in the course of discussion on this item, it was accepted at RACCE that neither Marine Scotland nor the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency [SEPA] have any existing powers on the matter.
This is in flat contradiction to what the Chair of the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation, Professor Phil Thomas, told the RACCE committee before. It ought to be of general concern that an academic has so little regard for fact.
The bad news is that it is now officially recognised that that wild fish have no protection. Nor, it appears does the integrity of factual accuracy.
RACCE is on the record in recent minutes as saying, with an intuited impatience, that the progress of the Aquaculture Bill which is its current business, is mired in the endemic opposition between the Scottish Salmon Farmers Organisation and the Salmon and Trout Association.
It is beyond time that those in authority and with legislative responsibility recognised that if they cannot or will not distinguish accuracy from fiction themselves, they are in urgent need of the appointment of an agreed objective expert to advise them.
Research in this particular matter – the risk of the infestation of wild fish from the multifarious sea lice found free swimming around salmon farms, as they migrate and as they later return to their spawning beds – is itself too often effectively bought and is demonstrably unsound – as we will shortly show in the case of a recent study trumpeted by the same Professor Thomas.
The immediate question is what is going to be done to install the absent regulatory responsibility for the protection for wild salmon and trout – a very valuable industry for the Scottish economy in places which need that boost – and a clean one.
It is worth noting that at RACCE’s meeting last week, an amendment from the former Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, Alex Fergusson MSP – requiring the reporting of sea lice data on a farm by farm basis – was already defeated 7 votes to 2 – possibly affected to some degree by the fact that Mr Fergusson was not present to speak to it.
What we are seeing in the political management of the Aquaculture Bill’s framing and passage is what has all the appearance of a systemic bias against the valuable and responsible wild salmon and trout fisheries. It is inevitable that Scotland will, at some point, pay for this blinkered discrimination.
Note: The photograph above shows the view down Glen Orchy in north Argyll, with the River Orchy in the foreground. It is copyrighted to Rebecca Beeston and reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
