Opinion: Will we ever resist the critics?
I write this just as the United States has attacked Iran. Now before I get shot at, I do have my views on this but the point I am trying to make is not political. It is that Trump and the US have had enough of Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen, the Muslim Brotherhood etc.
The West has had to face the insidious behaviour of a regime, cruel to its own people but also critical and destructive to any regime it deems unworthy to survive. These things are not debated by either side of the political discourse, but of course the action chosen is.
In our industry we have listened to a set of critics for over 30 years now, saying the same thing but never producing any evidence. Whether it is on the west coast of Canada, Norway or Scotland, the same mantra is preached whilst our industry complains that it is unfair, that we are misrepresented and ill-treated.
For many years we have been outflanked by the critics, who move in the corridors of power and have suborned members of the civil service to their cause. Not only that but some scientists (so-called) espouse this view but will never debate with anyone or discuss it in public, especially those in the pay of the government.
We hear of the unhappiness in the industry and of the unfairness of the unwillingness to debate but in a world where thinking a man is a man and a woman is a woman is called “gender critical”, why are we surprised?
It took an incredibly brave woman called Maya Forstater and the campaigning group Sex Matters to force the government to the Supreme Court before people started to react. Now again, I am not raising this in order to suggest that you should support my view but if people are attacked for believing what the human race has believed for thousands of years, why are we surprised that government and activists believe something untrue?
For the entirety of my career in this industry we have been under fire for whatever reason critics could find, and because we did not rebut it but tried to find a compromise, people assumed what was said was true. We allowed it to happen.
They won’t meet us, here’s why
So here we are. Maya Forstater, who I was lucky enough to meet, had had enough and decided to act. When will we? I read Martin Jaffa’s weekly blog (“ReLAKSation”), not because it is always riveting (sorry Martin!) but because it is well researched, well thought-out and logical. Martin has never been a farmer but dispassionately breaks down the science involved with no personal gain but in every publication he is rightly stunned by the fact that neither government, the scientific bodies involved or the activist groups will meet him openly.
This is not cowardice but a very clear strategy. They won’t meet him because their credibility will come into question. This is the “gender critical” debate of the salmon industry and we need to address it. Either the great “high heid yins” of the industry believe we are to blame, in which case we should give up, or they do not and we should challenge the theories in court. If we do not then they will be perceived rightly as being true and we will face ever mounting regulation.
Just for the record, Martin is his last article suggested that I did not want an industry with large players, which is incorrect. I think it has always been inevitable. My issue was and is that low prices drove the small players out of the industry. To some extent it was inevitable, as efficiency drives profit, but also the small farmers involved almost never tried to differentiate, assuming that like agriculture they would survive come what may.
So my issue is that low prices never help the farmer on land or sea. Once small farms are gone then the investor is who decides what happens in an industry, not the consumer. It is the same in every food industry. Maturation of an industry brings differentiation and that is a good and necessary thing.
We can spend a lot of time discussing the merits of the salmon “dumping” case and the rest, but Martin did not see consignments of fish being sent to the Rungis International Market in France on commission, and I did. Low food prices destroy farming and certainly destroy high quality farming.
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