Meeting of the Parliament 20 March 2025 [Draft]
I share the member’s disappointment.
If I had known where we would be today, I would have joined those committee members who called for a moratorium in 2018, because that would have made the industry pay attention. I will explain why we need it to do so.
The figures for 2023 show that 33,000 tonnes of salmon died that year, and that the use of antibiotics was still going up at that stage—in fact, according to the Veterinary Medicines Directorate, there has been a 24 per cent increase since 2017. The industry will say that the level went down the following year, but the issue is that, overall, the use of antibiotics is still rising.
Let us look at the figures from 2024. Mowi lost 600,000 fish in the first nine months of the year, and it was closely followed by Bakkafrost, which lost 543,000. A huge amount of fish is being lost, and I do not believe that there should be any excuse for it. I am a farmer so I know what it is like: I know that, where there is breeding and where farming goes on, there is also a certain amount of dying.
Let us be clear, however: the fish that are put to sea—and 25 per cent of them are dying when they are put to sea—are probably the most mollycoddled animals that you could have. They are given treatment before they go out to sea, to stop them getting sea lice, and they are looked after carefully in the pens.