My Lords, it is a great pleasure to talk about the future of this wonderful fish, the Atlantic salmon. I declare some interests: my family have a week timeshare on the Tay and, as Secretary of State, I set up a task force to look at the future of the salmon, under Lord Nickson, who produced an excellent report, most of the recommendations of which have yet to be implemented more than 25 years later.
I have fished for salmon in both the United Kingdom and Iceland for some 27 years and, during that period, there has been what can only be described as a catastrophic decline in the numbers of salmon. Indeed, the United Nations has now decided that the Atlantic salmon is an endangered species, putting it in the same category as mountain gorillas, rhinos and lots of other animals. I suggest that, if people realised how threatened it is, this would be a much bigger issue of public debate. It is just unanswerable that urgent intervention is now required to save this fish.
What does that mean? Personally, I think it means that no wild fish should ever be killed. It means that we have to tackle the predators of salmon: the fish-eating birds and the seals. When I was Secretary of State, the Canadians had an interesting programme where they fired contraceptive darts to reduce the population, which also helps the seal population if it becomes excessive, which it is.
The most important thing is that we need cold, clean water. I very much welcome the Minister’s efforts to ensure that the water companies and their directors could find themselves in jail for continuing to pollute our rivers in the way they do. It is essential that the habitat is as clean as possible: although this is a strong fish, it is very sensitive.
We also need to think carefully about the sensitive use of hatcheries. We need to work out what we are doing here. Are we interested in creating ranching for people to catch fish, or are we interested in having conservation of this important animal? I believe the emphasis should be on the latter, not the former.
We need to understand more carefully what is going on at sea. Why do the return rates continue to fall? We need to have action on identifying those rates and what can be done about this.
The most important thing is tackling salmon farming, getting it out of open cages in the sea and on to the land—some people are already beginning to experiment with that. I remember my great friend, the late Orri Vigfússon, who did so much to save the salmon, talking to me about these possibilities more than a decade ago. We need to get on with that. I do not normally promote books, but I recommend The New Fish—noble Lords can find it on Amazon. I promise that, if they read that book, which details what is going on with salmon farming, they will never eat farmed salmon again.
This is a story of chemicals being poured on fish in order to deal with their lice, of the excessive use of antibiotics, of stock losses of as much as a quarter, and of fish being eaten alive. They market this product as Scottish salmon, but it is no more Scottish than anything else. It is actually a Norwegian salmon that has been created by genetic engineering to grow quickly in order to meet the needs of production. As such, if it escapes into the wild, it does huge damage to salmon populations. Recently in Iceland there was an escape from a salmon farm, and 1% of the population turned up to protest at the Icelandic parliament because of the damaging effects. Frogmen were employed in the rivers more than 100 kilometres away from the escape point in order to spearhead the salmon before they bred with the domestic salmon—the unique river salmon —with huge and damaging consequences.