Fisheries Committee on Dec. 1st, 2011

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much, Mr. MacAulay.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our guests for joining us today. We really appreciate the information you shared with us. It's been very helpful for this committee. Again, I want to say thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedules to appear before this committee.

We'll take a short break while we switch to our next witness.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Members, we'll start our meeting.

I'd like to say thank you to Mr. Tyedmers for taking the time out of his schedule today to appear before our committee.

I know you have met with our committee before and are familiar with the proceedings of the committee. So that we can get in as many questions as possible, we try to constrain members to a timeframe for questions and answers. And we generally allow about 10 minutes for opening comments.

Mr. Tyedmers, any time you're ready, I'll let you proceed with your opening comments.

[Dr. Peter Tyedmers, Associate Professor, School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University, As an Individual]

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, and thanks to all the members who are present for the invitation to appear before the committee again. I think it's been a year and a half since I first appeared, and that was in person.

My name is Peter Tyedmers, and I am an associate professor in the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University. My research focuses on understanding the resource and environmental sustainability of food systems, in particular fisheries and aquaculture systems. In this context, I'm particularly interested in the role that technologies play in moving us away from or toward sustainability.

To offer a little more detail, I've been attempting to measure the energy and related impacts of how we fish for and farm salmon for something like 15 years. Consequently, I broadly understand why I've been invited to appear as a witness for a second time, but I will admit to being a bit unclear as to the details of how I might best serve the committee. So my opening comments are going to be brief and generalized so that we can try to leave as much time for questions as possible.

Before I get into any substance, I'd like to make a quick observation that I've had a chance to look at some of the recent testimony that others invited to appear as witnesses have made, and reflecting on some of their testimony it occurred to me that I'd like to think that I'm not here to sell you on any specific ideas. While I know that some in industry, some in government, and some in the NGO community might see me, being an academic, as somewhat partisan, I'd like to believe that, if you'll excuse the English phrase, “I have no dog in this fight”. I'd like to think that I'm interested in just the understanding of how we do things and not so much in promoting one side or another.

All ways that we produce food and provide jobs have resource and environmental impacts. Seafood systems have many, if substantial, advantages over many other types of animal food production systems. The challenge from my perspective is how we understand what these resource and environmental impacts are and how we end up accepting the trade-offs that our choices entail.

If we think about closed containment aquaculture, we know that these systems can take many forms. We can think of them as lining up over a sort of continuum on a spectrum, in terms of the extent to which we substitute technologies that require material and energy inputs for ecological services that would otherwise be provided—to a certain extent, we could imagine—for free, but nothing is ultimately free, that sustain salmon in culture.

What are we talking about here? Well, depending on the type of culture system, in the closed containment system we're dealing with we have pumps that have to move water. That may involve moving water up hill or maybe moving water around a culture environment. We often need to bring supplemental oxygen in to keep animals alive. In some cases we use other technologies to strip waste products and either recover these waste products or at least submit them to the broader environment. That could be CO₂, as a result of the respiration of these animals in culture. In a lot of closed containment environments we're dealing with very high densities of animal biomass, and if we don't remove the CO₂, these animals will get sick and die very quickly.

In many of these contexts we also have the opportunity to strip excreted wastes. These might be solid wastes, wastes that are in the water. Depending on how we want to design these systems, we want to recover these and treat them, take them on land and do something with them.

Importantly, all of this is typically underpinned by energy inputs. It's very hard to escape the secondary requirements for additional energy inputs when we start to add new technologies and substitute them for ecosystem goods and services. The research I've done with some of my students and colleagues in the past suggests that these energy inputs can be very large, depending on the extent to which we're substituting technologies for ecosystem services.

Very briefly—and I'm sure that some of you may have had a chance to look at some of the work we've published in the past—when we've compared real-world data from net pen systems to that from in-water bag systems on land-based tank farms sited in British Columbia and that from land-based Arctic char farms on fresh water here in Nova Scotia, we have found that if we exclude the energy associated with providing feed, the electricity required on the farm sites for bag systems that required pumping was 1.5 kilowatt hours per live-weight tonne of salmon produced.

In contrast, a tank farm sited in Cedar, British Columbia, required over 13 kilowatt hours per kilogram of live salmon produced. The Arctic char farm here in Nova Scotia, given all of its challenges in actually producing healthy fish with relatively low inputs, was requiring over 22 kilowatt hours of electricity per live-weight tonne of fish.

If we step back and think about the broader life-cycle, total energy requirements of these systems—and for a 2009 paper in British Columbia, we modelled a net pen system and included all of the inputs associated with small provisioning and feed production and provisioning, and all the things that go on within the farm—it takes about 27 megajoules per kilogram of live-weight salmon produced. At the other extreme, when we look at the land-based Arctic char farm on fresh water, which has a full recirculation system, it took over eight and a half times the total amount of energy required to produce those animals, per kilogram of animal produced.

Somewhat similarly, although on a smaller scale, if we look at greenhouse gas emissions—this also includes the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with all of the feed provisioning, which is a critical aspect of understanding these systems—for net pens it was about two kilograms of CO₂-equivalent greenhouse gases per kilogram of salmon produced in a net pen system. It was five times that level when we were looking at the Arctic char farm in Nova Scotia.

It's important to note that the work we've done in the past does not attempt to quantify local ecological benefits or costs of the systems we have characterized or attempt to quantify what might be possible if some of these systems worked more efficiently, through either better management or economies of scale, if those are possible, or the application of better, less resource-intensive technologies.

Essentially the work we have done in the past, and which I prefer to do, is to characterize systems based on their real-world performance. It's a critically important aspect. People engage in design and engineering to try to imagine what the next best technology is going to look like. We need this to happen. But if we assume that reality is going to mirror our theory and models perfectly, we are often in for a bit of a surprise.

The upshot is that while isolating salmon from the aquatic environment may provide benefits in terms of reducing local ecological interactions, that result is not guaranteed to occur in all closed containment technologies. It also means that many of the ecosystem services, whether we're talking about oxygen provisioning, waste assimilation, or maintenance of a reasonable temperature regime to keep animals alive, are diminished or lost when we substitute technologies underpinned by energy.

Let me be clear. I'm not saying that all closed containment technologies share in these challenges. If we think about the continuum of technologies that are available, at the extreme end we are basically rearing salmon in environments that are extremely far removed from what would naturally keep them alive. The only way we can do that is to provide a lot of energy inputs.

As I mentioned earlier, I've had a chance to review the testimony of some of your more recent witnesses that have appeared. While I would say I applaud their enthusiasm and optimism regarding the likely energy and associated greenhouse gas emissions for what they see as the proposed next generation of land-based closed containment technologies, I remain unconvinced regarding some of their projections. From my perspective, the numbers simply don't seem to make sense. They seem very optimistic. Again, ultimately, the proof has to be in the performance of these systems in the real world.

By comparing the energy and greenhouse gas emissions associated with different culture systems, as I think some of them have done, while excluding what is a central driver of energy costs to salmon culture and greenhouse gas emissions—by which I mean feed—they are greatly restricting what we can honestly say about the differences in these technologies at the back end.

So while it's important to make these comparisons, I think we have to be very guarded when we don't have real data on real performance. We're very limited in what we can say about the relative performance of two systems—net pens versus some sort of closed containment—if we choose to exclude what is in most cases one of the major drivers of impact, and that's feed.

I think that's still under 10 minutes, and I'd love to move to questions if that works for the committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

That's terrific. Thank you, Mr. Tyedmers.

Mr. Sopuck.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette, MB]

That was a most interesting and informative presentation, Mr. Tyedmers. What I really liked about it is that you put numbers on everything. Ultimately these kinds of decisions must be made based on the numbers.

I come from a farming constituency in western Canada, but as I heard you present to us, many agricultural analogies sprang to mind.

Let's just take beef cattle ranching as a comparison. There are different types of beef cattle production. Can we say that net pen aquaculture in coastal waters is kind of like grass-fed beef in natural pastures and natural habitat, such as occurs in southwestern Saskatchewan, sort of a semi-wild kind of food production that is not that far removed from the natural world itself?

[Dr. Peter Tyedmers]

You've invited me to wade into some deep waters and talk about systems that I don't have direct expertise in modelling myself. But it turns out that actually in one of my courses just last week we were talking about this very subject, so I've had a chance to think about it a little bit. I was a bit prescient.

I wouldn't say they're analogous, because one of the major differences is that cattle on pasture are essentially foraging for themselves. It's basically a solar-powered food collection system. In contrast, in a net pen we've already moved them away from that. We've already substituted a bunch of technologies for their foraging behaviour. We're talking about tractors, fishing boats, processing plants, transport trucks, and barges that bring food to them.

The closer analogy might be between cattle in a full confinement feedlot sort of setting with fish in a net pen. But again, we're also talking about very different animals with different metabolic needs. Cattle are warm-blooded and need to burn a lot more fuel in terms of food to keep themselves alive than fish do. There are also very substantial differences in the basic biology, the fecundity of these two production systems. It's difficult to just isolate and talk about a cow standing alone in a field and a salmon alone in a net pen and try to make direct comparisons, because you really need to think of the whole system.

But to get back to your direct question, I would say these things—a cow in a pasture and a salmon in a net pen—are not very good analogies for each other from a technology perspective, because we're substituting technologies for foraging behaviour in the net pen.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette, MB]

Right. I appreciate the distinction, and I think you're right on there.

But I think the agriculture-aquaculture analogy stands in many ways, because if we look back in human history, we started off as hunters and gatherers. As agriculture developed, our reliance on wild food diminished through the application of energy and labour, and we actually ended up in the situation we have now where we do not have to hunt wildlife to live. We've replaced it with agriculture.

Maybe I'll ask you to speculate. Perhaps this is not quite in your area of expertise, but it seems to me that with the world demand for seafood rising and the ability of wild fish to sustain that almost at its breaking point, economically sound and productive ocean aquaculture can substitute for the harvesting of wild fish, which is basically a form of hunting, and be a force for conservation of wild fish stocks.

Could you speculate on that?

[Dr. Peter Tyedmers]

I could, but it might be dangerous.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette, MB]

Well, this is the business I am in, so....

[Dr. Peter Tyedmers]

Let me be more daring than might be prudent. I take your situation and I understand, because I've been wrestling with these questions for a long time.

Stepping away from salmon aquaculture to different ways of culturing different species and thinking more generally, absolutely aquaculture, writ large, right now plays a substantial role in providing extremely high-quality protein to humans. Over 50% of the seafood eaten globally right now is derived from aquaculture of one form or another.

But aquaculture is incredibly heterogeneous. Even within the culturing of salmonids, which is the focus of your committee right now, we see a huge range of different technologies, and we even see a huge range of different technologies that we can deploy in terms of catching salmon. In fishing for salmon, everything from trolling to purse seining has very different consequences.

I would never say that cultured salmon are a good substitute for wild, if we're talking about a pure substitution. For our wild stocks of salmon, particularly in the Pacific—Atlantic stocks of salmon are commercially extinct in most jurisdictions—we still have tremendously productive ecosystems, right from headwater streams all the way through to the ocean, that can sustain viable populations and feed people and sustain livelihoods for hundreds of years still, if we are careful in their management. The amazing thing about that is that these animals are foraging in veritable deserts in the ocean and returning biomass to us.

I'm sorry to wax slightly poetic here, which I shouldn't try to do. But if you were to sit back and try to design an animal that you could eat 50% of, that tastes delicious, that you just have to let do its own thing and it will leave your territory, go out across the North Pacific, forage, and return two to four years later and be really easy to catch, you would design an animal like a wild salmon.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette, MB]

I think my time is up. Thank you so much for your really thoughtful answers.

The chairman is giving me the high sign. I'm sorry.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Donnelly.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, Dr. Tyedmers. I have a couple of questions for you.

If you're using the life-cycle analysis or full-cost accounting, which system of fishing would you say is the most sustainable? I would just throw out three options for you: the wild commercial fishery; open-net aquaculture; and closed containment, for which I would specifically suggest the RAS, or the recirculating aquaculture system.

[Dr. Peter Tyedmers]

Life-cycle assessment is not necessarily the same as full-cost accounting, and none of these tools is perfect. None of them is able to account for all of the things that we value. For example, life-cycle assessment is very good as an accounting tool to help us understand material and energy demands of the system and how those can contribute to a suite of, let's say, broad-scale environmental impacts like ozone depletion or greenhouse gas emissions. But that being said, if you're asking me which of those three ways of producing salmon has the lowest life-cycle energy demands and associated greenhouse gas emissions, generally speaking, some forms of fishery-based capture, particularly using gears like purse seine, but far less so if you're dealing with trolling.... Trolling burns, relatively speaking, 10 times the amount of fuel that purse seining does. But generally if you want a spectrum, life-cycle energy inputs and greenhouse emissions and associated other impacts are quite low when you have very abundant stocks and you're fishing them using gears like purse seining and net pen aquaculture. From data that currently exist, life-cycle impacts would be the highest for recirculating aquaculture systems per tonne or kilo of salmon that is produced.

I know that others out there would probably disagree with me about placing the recirculating aquaculture at the other extreme, but from the data we've modelled on real systems, that's the case.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you.

I guess the emphasis was, in your opinion, on what was the most sustainable and on using either of those two systems to account for that. You're talking about a form of wild commercial fishery.

Secondly, if you took that—and you can elaborate a little bit on that if you want—what do you think DFO should be doing to better manage either the wild fishery or aquaculture?

[Dr. Peter Tyedmers]

Well....

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

You have 30 seconds to answer that.

[Dr. Peter Tyedmers]

It's late in the day and I'm just not very well prepared to field that question.

The challenges DFO faces are really substantial on both of these fronts. For me to suggest which one approach would help move the game forward would be beyond heroic.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

So you don't want to hazard a guess or wade into that one.

Part of what this committee is looking at is how we manage the fishery, how we do that most sustainably, how we do that with the fewest impacts to the wild fishery, and how we consider aquaculture.

I have lots of time?

I'd like to turn it over to my colleague to ask a question, Dr. Tyedmers.

[Rosane Doré Lefebvre, NDP, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mr. Donnelly.

Thank you to you, Dr. Tyedmers.

Your position on the subject is really interesting. You talked a lot about environmental impacts. We've heard several other witnesses talk to us about the effects on the environment of both closed containment aquaculture and net cage aquaculture. From the various testimonies heard, we gather that there are consequences for the environment.

My question is about the environmental impacts noted when net cage aquaculture is used. In your opinion, to what extent does this type of aquaculture affect the marine ecosystems, not only with regard for example to salmon, but also all species living together in our oceans?

[Dr. Peter Tyedmers]

I'm not a biologist. I don't actively study the approximate ecological impacts of net pen systems. The other challenge is, to be frank, that when you ask which is the most important or has the greatest impact, that is always, to a certain extent, in the eye of the beholder. I will provide you an answer, but my answer is going to be informed by my understanding of other people's work and my own values.

For net pen related work, from my perspective, the greatest chronic ecological effects would be those with benthic impacts, as well as in-shore impacts of waste accumulation in poorly sited settings. If we're taking impacts on salmonids off the table, in terms of sea lice and other negative interactions through disease transmission, I would probably say some of the more interesting and challenging approximate impacts associated with poorly sited farms and the benthic impacts associated with those. Again, those are impacts that can be remediated with time. If you fallow a site, my understanding is that in many instances within five years you can have a great deal of recovery in a lot of cases. Of course, depending on the locale and the setting, there can be big issues of negative predator interactions—seals and sea lions drowning in nets—but from my understanding, those tend to be relatively episodic. No one wants seals and sea lions drowning in nets. These situations are potentially avoidable.

I'm not sure if this helps.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you.

Mr. Allen.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Tyedmers, for being here with us today.

There's an old adage that when you're marketing things, location matters. For some of the work you do, there are tremendous differences across Canada in how our energy needs are actually met. In eastern Canada, as you're aware, we get a lot of our power from fossil fuels and that type of thing.

Based on your assessment, if we went to a situation of closed containment on land, would that benefit one region over another in terms of the long-term viability of the industry, unless, for example, all our carbon technology and energy-generating technology was changed?