The Greenland Declaration

By Phil Thomas, Chairman of the Scottish Salmon Producers’ Organisation (SSPO)

North American and British game-angling organisations are up in arms about a proposal by Greenland to increase catches of wild Atlantic salmon in its regional ocean waters. So, what’s the issue and why does it have implications for salmon aquaculture? In 1984, leading nations around the Atlantic Ocean signed an international treaty on the conservation of wild Atlantic salmon which led to the foundation of the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organisation (NASCO). The current NASCO parties are USA, Canada, Russia, EU, Norway and Denmark (in respect of the Faroe Islands and Greenland); the financial crisis of 2009 forced Iceland to withdraw but it is expected to rejoin at some time in the near future. NASCO’s foundation reflected growing concern that wild salmon stocks in North American and European rivers and coastal waters had declined substantially from the early 1970s. Since salmon are an anadromous species, it was concluded that stock conservation needed to include not only measures in natal rivers and home waters but also in the distant ocean feeding grounds, like those around Greenland. NASCO was tasked with gathering salmon statistics from across the Atlantic region, and promoting research and international agreements on salmon conservation. Amongst the latter was a negotiated reduction in annual salmon catches by Greenland fishermen from around 210 tonnes in the 1980s to a subsistence level of 20-30 tonnes, which has been in place for most of the last decade. However, Greenland has now declared its intention to increase subsistence catches to perhaps 40 tonnes and to reintroduce a commercial catch of perhaps 35 tonnes. Clearly this proposal has potential conservation implications, although assessing the scale of its likely impact in practice is not easy. However, it additionally raises other issues which are potentially far reaching. Greenland’s case, essentially, is that it has made major sacrifices for salmon conservation, but other NASCO parties have not responded to a corresponding degree. Its declaration therefore appears as something of a spur, prompting a rethink on the part of other NASCO signatories. In fact, ICES reports to NASCO show that in 2011 Greenland caught and killed 28 tonnes of salmon, whilst the corresponding figures for North America and the European region were 182 tonnes and 1,424 tonnes, respectively. In both the American and European fisheries over 60% of the salmon killed were caught in-river (as distinct from coastal or estuarine catches), implying mainly recreational salmon angling rather than any kind of fishing by necessity. Bodies like the Atlantic Salmon Federation (ASF) and the Salmon and Trout Association (S&TA) have been quick to condemn Greenland’s proposals. However, some angling commentators have taken a more thoughtful approach and have recognised the conservation conflicts in a sport that relies on fishing a species which is in decline. They are calling for a mandatory adoption of catch and release angling in all recreational fisheries. However, so long as angling is allowed in rivers that are below their stock-conservation limits (and this is the case in many countries), even catch and release fishing, with its attendant level of unintended mortality, is questionable. More fundamentally, however, there is an elephant in the room that really needs to be considered. Over the years, NASCO has acted as an important international focus for salmon conservation, but the underlying decline in salmon stocks has continued largely unabated. Atlantic salmon numbers have reduced, particularly over the southernmost range for the species; there are now parts of the USA, Canada and Europe where the presence of Atlantic salmon is considered to be locally endangered or at risk. Policy makers must therefore think seriously about the introduction of active intervention programmes to address the restoration of Atlantic salmon stocks across its full range – whether that is done to achieve ecological objectives or to support recreational angling. In this, NASCO’s conservation focus has brought the scientific realisation that the most important change since the 1970s has been a massive increase in the mortality of migratory salmon at sea. To overcome this problem, there is an inescapable logic in conservation interventions that cultivate a proportion of outward-migrating wild smolts using aquaculture methods so that they can then be released as ‘inwardly-migrating’ mature fish. It is therefore interesting to record that just such a study has recently been undertaken in the inner Bay of Fundy area by Patrick O’Reilly and his colleagues from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography. This project has shown a considerable degree of success and, whilst there are inevitably questions still to be addressed, the technique appears to provide a practical solution for an intractable conservation problem. So, whilst the reverberations from the Greenland declaration may initially have their impact on attitudes towards recreational angling, the longer-term and more important influences may be to change thinking on salmon conservation and to prompt a rethink of the practical solutions that salmon aquaculture can provide.