Considerable anxiety is building up in Scotland over the polluting effects of the fish farming industry. The Scottish Executive has been remarkably relaxed about the issue and this has merely heightened the feeling that, among civil servants at the very least, there is a
presumption in favour of the industry whenever its responsibility for pollution is raised. If this is so it must end. The
discovery, based on the best scientific methods of assessment, that fish farming pumps almost twice as much pollution into Scottish coastal waters as human sewage does every year is shocking,
both as a fact and also in relation to suspected consequences.
Yesterday the Scottish health minister raised in Brussels the problem of the amnesic shellfish poisoning which has all but killed off the Scottish scallop industry. Scallop fishing used to earn #10m a year, much of it from exports to Europe, but it has been banned for most of this year and last because of the toxic blooms which cause the poisoning. Scientists have suspected for some time that the naturally occurring blooms of toxic algae have been made worse and more frequent in their occurrences because they have fed on the pollution pumped into coastal waters by the fish farms.
There are suggestions that Scotland may be able to follow the Irish system whereby the white meat of the scallop can be sold even if the rest of it is poisoned. This may be a lifeline of sorts for the Scottish industry but it is far from being a complete answer.The most important task must be to reduce the pollution which fish farms cause. Responsibility for planning permission for fish farms will pass to local councils and it is not clear whether this will result in a more rigorous approach. The siting of farms in sheltered coastal areas such as sea lochs or, with utter irresponsibility, in an almost enclosed area of clean water such as Scapa Flow in Orkney, appears to have happened without any serious examination of environmental issues. The Scottish Executive must complement and support the new, tough attitude to fish farm pollution adopted by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency,
and this approach should be bolstered by a public inquiry into the environmental damage which it has caused already.
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