Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-10-Speech-2-310"
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"en.20040210.11.2-310"2
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"Mr President, this is clearly a very important subject. Salmon farming has often been criticised in the past for its environmental impact, but only recently have potential health impacts been raised. It is crucial that these be better understood.
Health advice given by governments across the EU traditionally highlights the importance of eating more fish. Yet, if risk analysis suggests that consumption of farmed Atlantic salmon poses health risks that detract from the beneficial effect of fish consumption, then we need to know more about that. We need to understand more about it and we need to act on that knowledge. We need to know for certain that farmed salmon has more contaminants than wild fish and that dioxins are among the most toxic chemicals ever created.
So far the debate has been dominated by arguments over whether the contamination found in the salmon was legal. What we should be concentrating on is whether the salmon is genuinely safe. That might well mean revisiting the limits that were set for contamination in 2001.
I want to get away from the arguments for or against Scottish salmon or any other kind of salmon. These are not very helpful. We should be talking about whether aquaculture itself is providing a viable and environmentally sustainable food for humans, and I would argue that the answer is increasingly looking like 'no'. Also associated with aquaculture is a whole range of other problems, including the spread of disease and parasites to wild fish, the use of fish, fishmeal and fish oil as food with impacts on wild fish stocks, pollution of the sea floor from unconsumed food, the impact on predators when they are killed and the antibiotics used to control the disease. There are some genuinely important issues here that need to be looked at and yet, perversely, governments continue to support aquaculture when, in many ways, they might well be better off putting their time and resources into rehabilitating the natural habitats of salmon so as to allow the wild stocks to recover.
This latest health report on salmon should be taken as a wake-up call to change the way we farm fish. I look forward to a Commission revision of the standards based on genuine safety measures, not on allowances for background environmental levels, because health cannot and should not be compromised."@en1
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