The world's largest seafood company is coming under pressure to relocate hundreds of salmon farms after its biggest shareholder said it was harming wild stocks.
Billionaire John Fredriksen, who holds a 29% stake in Marine Harvest, told Norwegian newspaper Altaposten that wild salmon had a grim future if fish farms were allowed near salmon rivers.
The comments have provoked an enthusiastic response from green campaigners, who claim escaped farmed fish are causing the decline of wild salmon through infectious diseases, pollution, and interbreeding. A group of 32 conservation organisations have written to Marine Harvest asking it to act on Fredriksen's comments.
"It was an international wake-up call to the salmon farming industry," said Don Staniford, European representative for the Pure Salmon Campaign. "Marine Harvest has a unique opportunity to save what's left of Scotland's wild salmon stocks on the west coast and must now rise to the challenge."
Scottish waters support 300 salmon farms, producing 150,000 tonnes of fish, worth an estimated £700m. Campaigners argue most of those farms, as well as others in Norway and Canada, are inappropriately sited, and are urging operators to spend millions of pounds relocating them.
"Scotland's salmon farming industry needs to announce exactly when the mass relocation of farms will begin and when it will be completed," said Paul Knight, director of the Salmon and Trout Association in the UK.
The calls have been met with a refusal to act from Marine Harvest. A spokesman said there was no scientific basis for thinking salmon farming damaged wild fish.
"Our farming operations comply with rules and regulations in all areas we operate," he added. "We constantly work to improve the conditions under which we produce our salmon and make the visual and physical effect on the environment from our cages as minimal as possible."
The company's Scottish sea farms manager, Ben Hadfield, said a "pioneering" programme of limited farm relocations would continue, in consultation with the angling community.
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