Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, I will address a false story that has been deliberately perpetuated by the Liberals on behalf of the three big Tasmanian salmon corporations. It is a narrative that pretends that creating, maintaining and stoking a Tasmanian salmon industry is somehow a virtuous and necessary alternative to depleting wild‑caught fish stocks. Its most extreme version has Tasmanian salmon as the saviour of a wild‑caught fish populations. Actually, that could not be further from the truth.
The impact on wild fish populations is significantly higher than has previously been reported. There is some good research done by scientists from the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Sciences. That research uses a metric for measuring the efficiency of aquaculture, a fish-in:fish-out – FI ratio. The study has found that wild fish inputs into aquaculture are between 27 per cent and 307 per cent higher than previous estimates. For carnivorous species like salmon, the wild fish used often exceeded double the amount of farmed fish biomass being produced.
That leads us to what is happening here in Tasmania. Investigations have found that krill is used by the two major Tasmanian aquaculture companies, Tassal and Huon, and their feed suppliers. BioMar, located in Wesley Vale, Tasmania, uses 1200 tonnes of krill meal a year and that is particularly captured from the great oceans of the south. Ships spot whales and follow them, deliberately aiming get ahead of the whales so they can scoop up the krill balls the whales are chasing to eat. They are literally stealing the krill from the whales’ mouths.
BioMar is one of Australia’s biggest users of krill. BioMar supplies feed primarily to Huon Aquaculture, which is now owned by international corporate JBS. Another salmon feed producer, Skretting, has been found to use approximately 200 tonnes of krill a year. Skretting has supplied feed primarily to Tassal, now owned by Cook Seafood, but claims to make feed using a zero-fishmeal product.
In relation to anchovies, fishmeal used in feed for the Tasmanian salmon industry comes from Chimbote in Peru. The Chimbote industry has decimated the wild anchovy stocks in Peruvian waters, polluted the waterways and coastlines, and caused massive health problems for locals. That is a very high price to pay for anchovy fishmeal that ends up being used by the industrial salmon industry in our feed here, then polluting our own waterways after it goes into the salmon pens. There is about 53 million cubic metres of sludge in the waters around Chimbote in Peru. That is residual waste from the fishmeal factories.
Peruvian fishermen slaughter thousands of sea lions so they can disrupt the natural food chain of the region. In other words, they kill the natural predators of anchovy populations in order to take the anchovies to put into the fishmeal that ends up in our salmon pens in Tasmania. You will not see these images on the glossy brochures of Tassal and Huon Aquaculture. However, BioMar still sources Peruvian anchovies to make its fishmeal.
In 2021, Tassal claimed it used 1.73 kg of wild fish to make 1 kg of salmon. There is something very wrong with that equation.
Elsewhere, there is huge murkiness around the West African fishmeal industry. What we know is that vast amounts of wild fish are hauled from waters by supertrawlers from Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania and other West African countries, and the resulting product most likely ends up in the Tasmanian industry. We know the West African fishmeal industry supplies vast quantities of fishmeal to salmon producers globally. A significant proportion of fish used for fish oil in salmon feed is sourced from food‑insecure regions such as West Africa, where food insecurity is now at a 10-year high. A coalition of international organisations and academics has called on the Norwegian government to ban the salmon farming industry from sourcing fish oil from West Africa. The fish grown by companies in Tasmania is definitely not sustainable.
Time expired.
