I was reading The Guardian newspaper online yesterday when I came across this headline:
Major New Zealand salmon producer shuts farms as warming waters cause mass die-offs
Actually, it wasn’t the headline itself that caught my attention. News like this is becoming all to common lately. It was what I read a few lines into the article that stopped me in my tracks: New Zealand has a huge Chinook salmon farming industry! The biggest in the world. Chinook, or king salmon, is my favorite fish to eat and to fish for. Unfortunately, it is hard to find in Japan with wild chinook totally unavailable. But one time I did find some New Zealand farmed chinook at the old Tsukiji fish market. Of course, I bought a few pieces, and they weren’t bad. Knowing what I know now, those pieces of chinook likely came from the firm the article is about.
The point of the story is how quickly climate change is impacting food production. The temperature of the waters where the salmon have been farmed have increased only one degree Celsius. But that has led to seven times more fish being taken to the local landfill than just one year ago: 1,269 tons, nearly 40% of production.
Here is a link to the article: