Scotland’s Salmon Crisis

Gigha has long been lauded as one of the great successes of the community land buyout movement. When the community bought their island in 2002 they put Gigha in the vanguard of the Scottish land reform movement, with the innovative Gigha Halibut project (now closed) and the ‘Dancing Sisters’ Gigha Battery Project, the first community-owned grid-connected wind farm in Scotland, they seemed to be a model for community empowerment.

But now Bakkafrost, a Faroese salmon company, are proposing siting eight 160-metre-wide cages and a feed barge on the west coast of the island. The promise is of five jobs. If that sounds meagre its proof of the precarious nature of the rural economy. 61% of those surveyed by the community council, oppose the plan. The case highlights the fragility of the actual autonomy of island communities and the limitations of the land reform movement.

Scotland’s lochs are pockmarked by salmon farming, often foreign-owned and guilty of mass pollution and what is increasingly apparent disgusting animal welfare. So why do we put up with an industry that pollutes our waters, effects our marine aquaculture and endangers wild salmon? It’s an absolutely huge business and used as an icon for Scotland around world. What a dark irony that an industry that’s destroying our natural environment is used to celebrate our ‘wild’ and ‘natural’ highlands.

Farmed salmon was the UK’s top food export in 2023. The past decade has seen Scotland’s £1.2bn aquaculture sector increase its contribution to the economy by 154% to £472m, surpassing marine fishing at £321m. No-one’s going to shut down that cash-cow even in the face of overwhelming evidence of  animal welfare issues, mass die-offs because of rising sea temperatures and widespread contamination of our sea.

Karen McVeigh, a writer specialising in the state of our oceans has written: “Rising death rates have sparked concern. About one in four Scottish salmon don’t live to harvest and data from the Fish Health Inspectorate reveals a trend of mostly rising mortality levels in seawater in recent years, from just over 4m in 2020 to more than 10m last year.”

“Campaigners point out that one of Bakkafrost’s salmon units off Gigha, Druimyeon Bay farm, had the highest cumulative mortality of all Scotland’s active fish farms in 2023, at 82.3%, according to industry figures. It is also one of Scotland’s most southerly salmon farms.”

Matt McGrath, the BBC’s Environment Correspondent (though interestingly not the Scottish one) has written: “Salmon farming has come a long way since the fish were first grown commercially in cages in Norway in the 1960s. The industry has expanded rapidly in recent decades, with around 70% of salmon eaten around the world now coming from farms.”