Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. Thank you for your invitation to testify before you today.
My name is Vincent Erenst and I am Dutch. I am accompanied by my colleague Mr. Clare Backman, who is the director of sustainability.
As to my background, I hold a master's degree in science from the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands. I've worked in aquaculture since 1984, in various countries and with a variety of species. I would also like to say that in the first 10 years I worked in closed land-based systems.
Before I let Clare speak to the environmental practices of our company, I'd like to give you some background on our company and make some comments on the testimony that has been presented to you in earlier sessions of this committee.
Marine Harvest is the largest salmon farming company in B.C. It produces around 50% of the salmon grown in the province. We have 550 employees, and together we grow 40,000 tonnes of salmon per year. Our sales this year will be around $250 million Canadian; 30% of that is sold in Canada and 70% is sold in the U.S. We operate 41 farms; each holds between 400,000 and 500,000 fish, but there are never more than 30 to 32 farms stocked. The others will be lying fallow for a period of two to six months.
We also operate six hatcheries. Three are recirculating land-based closed-system hatcheries, where we grow our smolts. All our eggs come from our own brood stock, which is here in B.C. We do not import eggs, and we haven't done that for many years. We have two processing plants where all the fish that we produce are packed and processed.
Our business is profitable. Over the last five years we've had very strong cashflows. We reinvest a lot into our business here in B.C. to make it more robust and more sustainable; however, we have not been investing in growth for the last seven years, basically, as this has not been a possibility.
Our company is part of the Marine Harvest group. This company had its origin in Scotland in the 1960s; it became part of a Dutch group in the 1990s, and since 2007 we have been a publicly traded company listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. We are listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange because that's the best stock exchange for fish-farming companies. In the same way that mining companies are often listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, fish-farming companies are typically listed on the Norwegian stock exchange.
We have 16,000 shareholders and, believe it or not, the majority of the shares are owned by institutions and individuals who are not Norwegian. Interestingly enough, some of our shares are in fact owned by Canadian NGOs, and they can look forward to a healthy dividend this year.
Contrary to what you've heard in earlier testimony, in B.C. we are really a Canadian company. Our staff is 98% Canadian. With the exception of myself--I'm Dutch--and three Chileans, we're all Canadian. The management of the company, again apart from myself, is fully Canadian. About 90% of everything we buy comes from Canada, and a very large part of that comes from B.C.
It has also been said that we don't hire people locally and that we pay low wages. I can tell you that the large majority of our employees are from the northern half of Vancouver Island, where we are today the largest private employer. The remainder of our people are from the first nations community in Klemtu, and in that area, where we operate five farms and a processing plant, virtually all our employees are from the local community.
As to wages, our hourly employees, after one year of employment, make between $18 and $30 an hour. They have extended health care and all the benefits, including a pension and an annual bonus.
It has been said that we are very secretive about our practices. This is definitely not true. We regularly report to our regulators with a great amount of detail. The corporation publishes an annual sustainability report that discloses a lot of information to the public. Marine Harvest Canada, this year, will publish its own sustainability report in August or September. It will have a lot of detailed information on our operations here in B.C.
I'd also recommend that you have a look at our website, marineharvestcanada.com, where there's a tremendous amount of information on how we grow salmon, where we grow them, their numbers, and so on.
Last but not least, in fact Mrs. Morton regularly writes us emails and regularly calls us. We always answer her and we always give her full information.
Before turning it over to Clare, I would like to invite all of you to come to B.C. and have a look at our operations. You can see a closed-containment freshwater land-based operation. Mr. Donnelly has already done so, and I would be glad to welcome a few more of you.