A letter to Falkland Islanders from Richard Flanagan

Fellow islanders,

Like you I am an islander, born and bred, my island being Tasmania. The sea and all that flows from living by the sea is important to Tasmanians – and loved. We swim, fish, boat, surf, sail, dive and explore our coasts; we treasure their wildness and their serenity, their majesty and their myriad gifts, from the fish we eat to the joy they bring.

And so I write to warn you: do not allow the salmon industry to begin operating in the waters of your beautiful islands. For over forty years we Tasmanians have witnessed the salmon industry slowly destroy so much we love, so much that was unique to us, beautiful and irreplaceable.

The salmon farmers will come bearing gifts and promises, but all of them will turn to slime and algae and death. The salmon farmers will poison your waters, kill its creatures, both fish and sea birds, and then when you start to object and then to protest and then to fight, they will seek to poison your community, destroy your democracy, and divide one islander from the next.

For to rob and destroy, they must lie and deceive.

For twenty years my neighbours and I tried to work with the salmon farmers across the water from my writing shack. We acted in good faith, seeking some form of compromise we always knew at best was inadequate, but accepting them and their ways, trying to pretend what was happening wasn’t, seeking only some tempering at the edges. We tried to ignore the growing pollution, the slow decay and growing sickness of our sea, and believed that they, like any industry, would slowly improve their practices.

But they didn’t. Their practices grew only worse as they grew richer. They made promises that were either never kept or soon broken. After a very long time – two decades – we had to accept that they had played us for fools all along. And after twenty years I began talking with others elsewhere to discover our experience was not unique; that everywhere there was another fish farm where locals had experienced the same arrogance and dismissal as the destruction steadily grew.

Worse, the corporations had created a culture of silence and fear through threats to people’s careers and businesses when they chose to speak out. I discovered how much was wrong and deeply destructive about this supposedly green industry – the very worst form of factory farming – and how much worse it was than what I had known. I set out to write an article but as the rap sheet kept growing, I ended up needing to write a book to capture the scale of just how catastrophic this industry had become.

And after the book was published I began to hear from people from Norway. From Chile. From Scotland and Iceland and Canada. And I learnt my experience was the same experience the world over.

Salmon farming is only about the greed for profit. I write farming but it is not farming, nor is it any form of aquatic agriculture. Rather in its inbuilt capacity for environmental damage, it is closest to the fossil fuel industries as it strip mines the sea, leaving it a series of ruined wastes and death zones, its ecosystems at best badly sickened and at worst destroyed.

The fish farm opposite where I once wrote spews out the equivalent untreated sewage of a town of 50,000 people. An industry producing 200,000 tonnes, which is the ambition in the Falklands, will spew out the equivalent untreated sewage of a city of eight million people into your seas. Anyone who calmly argued for a city of eight million people to be established on the Falklands pouring the entirety of its sewage untreated into the sea and claiming it would be without terrible impact would be laughed out of Stanley.

But that’s exactly what the salmon industry argues. They will say the extraordinary nutrient outfall will wash away, that it won’t do damage, that they will monitor it and ensure it is of no consequence. They will say they will be world’s best practice. Tasmania’s salmon industry, by the way, is world’s best practice – or claims to be. Let me tell you what world best practice looks like – it looks like the routine bombing of fur seals, over 60,000 seal bombs being used in Tasmanian floating feed lots over the last six years. Of sea birds and dolphins dying entangled in nets. Of dead zones stretching out far from the site of the aquatic feed lots. Of our drinking water so fouled by the pollution of their hatcheries that Tasmania had to spend $250 million on a water treatment plant to make its Hobart drinking water once more drinkable. It looks like the sickening of many coastal waters, the ecological collapse of one of our most prized waterways, the trashing of World Heritage Areas. And now there is the imminent extinction of an ancient and globally unique species, the Maugean skate, which no less an authority than the Australian government’s own scientists attribute to salmon farming.

Let me tell you as one who witnessed the slow vanishing of sea life: it happens. First one species disappears, then another and then another. (In Norway, according to a recent report in the Guardian, it is, in the cruellest irony, wild Atlantic salmon that ‘Experts say . . . is at imminent threat from salmon farming’.) When you dive you see everywhere the strange aquatic dust from the farms smothering the reefs and sea grass and seaweed. When you walk your beaches you will see the algae wash up in thick stinking mats. When you wander the coast you will see their endless plastic detritus from their farm, both from carelessness and storms smashing infrastructure – pipes and ropes and all manner of plastics from the smallest to long lengths of massive piping that threatens anyone out in the boat. And best of luck getting the salmon corporations to ever clean it up adequately.

What you won’t see are the tonnes of microplastics entering your marine ecosystem from the feed pipes as they are slowly scoured by the salmon feed pellets. Nor will you see the antibiotics they will use every summer, dumping at times tonnes into the sea, as they routinely do here in Tasmania, unsafe levels being found in wild fish up to seven kilometres from the farm.

If you happen to live near a farm you will notice the noise of pumping diesel feed compressors going 24/7, the noise of net cleaners and venturation operations, the huge motherships vacuuming up fish. You will notice the farm lights sweeping into your home every evening.

And should you then choose to question or to protest or urge better practice prepare for bullying, threats, and harassment. Around the world the salmon industry runs on intimidation at best and corruption at worst. Because it takes something publicly owned and treasured – our seas – and inevitably destroys them, it must cultivate ever closer relationships with politicians and bureaucrats to shield it from growing public anger, a process that leads ever downwards to darker and darker depths.

That is why in Tasmania the overwhelming majority of Tasmanians, who once welcomed this industry and its false promise, today oppose sea-based salmon farming. That opposition is widespread across politics, class and region, an opposition now so widespread that the minister responsible for salmon farming last year begged Tasmanians to give the industry another go and to restore its social licence. And that is why around the world a movement is arising wanting to see the end of this foul, frightening industry.

You may reasonably ask what do I know about the Falkland Islands? As an islander I know this much: better an island be run by its own people, answerable to its own community, than its decisions be made elsewhere answerable solely to the diktat of profit. For there is an inevitable logic about salmon farming that is repeated over and over world wide. Accompanying its inevitable pollution and destruction of the seas is the growing concentration of ownership by a handful of multinational companies.

In Tasmania our first salmon company was state owned, later our several companies were all Tasmanian owned. Today there are just three companies and all three are 100% owned by foreign companies who have paid no Australian company tax for the last three years for which data is available. Their record is bad from terrible, from an ex-Japanese whaling company, Nissui, to Cooke Aquaculture, a Canadian company so bad that its actions led to the banning of sea-based salmon farming in Washington state because, according to Hilary Franz, the state commissioner of public lands there, ‘Cooke’s disregard ... recklessly put our state’s aquatic ecosystem at risk’. And then there is JBS, the Brazilian butchers, responsible for the worst corruption scandal in global history, with the bribing of over 1800 politicians, for which the brothers Wesley and Joesley Batista who run the family business went to jail in 2017. Corruption, said Joesley Batista the day before being imprisoned, ‘was the rule of the game. And what’s most important, corruption was on the upper floor, with the authorities.’ Today Wesley Batista’s son, Henrique, is the Hobart-based CEO of Huon Aquaculture.

If you want your island’s fate to be ultimately determined by these sort of people, support salmon farming. If you think it won't happen in your islands, think again, because it is now the reality here in Tasmania.

In 2022, Tasmania’s Premier Jeremy Rockliff failed to answer questions in parliament about a $4400-a-head Liberal Party fundraising dinner where, it was put to him, ‘one of the Brazilian butchers and the Cooke CEO’ had been present, and the Premier had reportedly said, ‘It’s not going to be popular but I’m here to tell you we will back your industry all the way’.

And this in the midst of an extraordinarily cynical government ‘community consultation’ process pretending to ask the Tasmanian people what they wanted the salmon industry to be, when in reality foreign owners are given whatever they ask for.

And so this is the choice you face in the Falkland Islands: let salmon farming begin, watch it poison your waters and when you object, watch it poison your society and democracy. Because in Tasmania, though the people oppose it, and though we are a democracy, both major parties totally and inexplicably back the salmon industry.

Yet the seas belong not to corporations but to all. They are our shared and common wealth. It is not private property to be exploited as distant corporations see fit, no matter the consequence. The salmon industry can bring you nothing but pain and sadness as it slowly destroys that world not in order to help you and your society, but solely for the greed of a few who live far away.

Don’t believe an expert in aquaculture is an expert in the consequences and impacts of aquaculture, no matter what they might protest. Their expertise and their living are founded in making fish fatter faster for as much money as possible. Your expertise is in your love of your island in all its complexity and wonder.

You face a choice. The example of the rest of the world warns you of what will happen to what you love if you don’t exercise it.

Know your best chance is simply not letting it ever begin. That your best time to act is now. Get educated. Get organised. And fight now as publicly and as hard as you can. I understand only too well how hard it is in small communities to speak out. But ask yourself this one question: if not me, who? Say yes to what you love about your islands and your world, and say no to a salmon industry. Your alternative is the tragedy of my island home.

Richard Flanagan Tasmania September 2024