We eat farmed beef and sheepmeat; we eat intensively farmed veal, pork and poultry. We are already used to farmed salmon, to farmed trout, rainbow trout often passed off as `salmon trout'. Could the time come when all the fish we eat will be farmed? Recently char, a fish hardly known to most people came on the market from Irish ponds. An angling friend says turbot has been farm raised.
Is it possible that one day we will all be eating farmed herring, mackerel, sole, plaice and so on. Will vast tanks, many times the size of our present mariculture structures, float off our coasts and destroy their beauty, and, incidentally their tourist value? And some daft economist may tell us that this would be much cheaper for the consumer than the present way of maintaining huge fishing fleets and giant floating fish factories. Of course, this nightmare prospect is based on the philosophy that cheapness of food is everything. Never mind the unemployment of the fleets, of the shipbuilders, of all sorts of downstream activities.
As to the fodder given to these mackeral etc, well it may not be possible to procure the creatures and substances they live on normally, but the scientific people will surely come up with some substitute. Can't you foresee the BSE type of scare that could arise? But it's a nightmare that might creep up on us. All is not well with our present mariculture. The Western Fisheries Board declared during the past week that sea lice are returning to "devastate" Connemara sea trout for the ninth year in succession. The practice, which helped, of fish farms "fallowing" some bays during spring months, was abandoned said Michael Kennedy of the Board, and described this as "intolerable".
And all the time our Tourist Industry looks for an increase in the upper bracket of visitors, while the country throws away its wealth in one of the superlative fish in all creation, the sea trout or white trout. Angling for this is not an elite sport, but the carelessness with which it is treated, shows some loose slates in our thinking.