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.