Recently in The Vancouver Sun, Don Whiteley quoted a fish farm promoter spouting the same tired rhetoric about fish farms feeding the world and wild fisheries collapsing. This particular promoter, however, was expounding the virtues of a new species to be farmed - not salmon but sablefish. And it reminded me a lot of the stories we've grown accustomed to seeing in The Sun's business pages, the ones about penny stocks being driven up to obscenely high prices, only to collapse with huge losses to investors and a greatly enriched and now mysteriously absent promoter.

The history of salmon farming in BC is not very encouraging as more than a few investors will attest. The initial expansion during the 1980's saw the local investment community lose $300 million. After numerous bankruptcies and shakeouts, the remaining farms were controlled by a few large foreign corporations that today lose approximately $30 million a year. No wonder some of them now think that salmon farming is no longer the wave of the future.

Whiteley's article never mentioned this sad history or some other key facts. For example, it takes about three pounds of wild fish (as feed) to produce one pound of farmed salmon. With sablefish, the ratio is probably closer to five to one. Almost all of this feed is imported from the fish farmers' biggest competitors, Chile and Peru. If wild fish stocks are in fact collapsing, how will we feed new farmed species such as sablefish?

BC is one of the most expensive places in the world to farm fish and a recent Provincial Government report concludes it as unable to compete in the global market which includes major producers in Chile, Scotland and Norway. This, despite the fact that BC fish farmers get pretty much a free ride on the regulatory side, allowing them to pollute at levels unprecedented in other industries. While pulp mills are forced to spend millions to eliminate an annual output of a few pounds of potentially carcinogenic chemicals, fish farms are allowed to dump massive amounts of unregulated, uncontrolled pollutants into the ocean. The amount of sewage dumped by one fish farm can be as high as a town of 60,000 people. With over 100 fish farms licenced on BC's coast, this level of environmental contamination cannot continue. Have would-be sablefish farming investors been informed of the potentially huge costs associated with regulatory reforms? I suspect not.

And where are the studies demonstrating that farm sablefish is firstly, safe to eat, and secondly, a marketable product? How about market studies to verify that the existing market can withstand substantial increases in volume, or that there are substantial new markets waiting to be developed?

Currently, wild sablefish stocks are in extremely healthy shape and in fact are over supplying existing markets. This has resulted in prices falling to a 10-year low. A recent study from the University of Washington showed clearly that it would take only small amounts of farmed sablefish to completely collapse existing markets. The study concluded that farm sablefish production would be financially ruinous both for sablefish farm investors and the existing wild industry.

Interestingly, today's sablefish promoters once expounded the virtues of salmon farming. But after a decade of failure on the salmon front, they have now switched to a different species. My bet is that the large foreign salmon farming multinationals having lost millions in BC will be very reluctant to invest in another species here.

Instead, they are likely to do what many before them did and set up shop in Third World countries where labor costs are lower and environmental standards even more lax than here.

For these and many other reasons, people taking to boats to catch wild sablefish are adamantly opposed to the proposed expansion of sablefish farming in BC. Which is not to say that they are anti-farming. There are, in fact, many aquaculture operations that pose little ecological or economic risks to people in the existing commercial fishing sector. Shellfish farming being a good example - oysters, clams and geoduck.

On a final note, it is an affront to many that the first sablefish hatchery in BC is today pumping sewage into one of the largest native burial grounds on the coast, an ecologically sensitive area just off Saltspring Island. The area contains at least three different, rare and fragile ecosystems. Many local residents were adamantly opposed to the hatchery's location in this area and legal action is pending by outraged members of the local native community. Again, one wonders if investors were ever informed of this action or its potential costs in the future.

So investors beware when a man shows up with a vision of the future that he wants you to finance.

- Eric Wickham is Executive Director of the Canadian Sablefish Association.

This letter was written in response to this article from The Vancouver Sun.