French moratorium on new land-based salmon farms mirrors growing concerns in British Columbia over the risks of adopting unproven aquaculture technology.
By Fabian Dawson
SeaWestNews
France is poised to implement a decade-long moratorium on new land-based salmon farms, reflecting growing global skepticism about the readiness and viability of this emerging aquaculture technology.
The move mirrors mounting concerns in British Columbia, where salmon farmers and their Indigenous partners have long cautioned that large-scale land-based systems are not economically feasible, nor environmentally sustainable.
French lawmakers are now reviewing a bill that would halt the development of land-based salmon farms for ten years. The proposed legislation aims to pause the construction of three massive recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) projects: Pure Salmon in Verdon-sur-Mer, Local Ocean in Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Smart Salmon in Brittany’s Guingamp region.
The bill’s backers, fuelled by a wave of activism from groups like Welfarm and Seastemik, claim the halt is necessary to gather clearer scientific evidence about the environmental, ethical, and economic viability of these hyper-intensive fish farming operations.
The activists say there are too many unknowns in land-based salmon farming and that France should not become a testing ground for unproven technology with such high stakes for the environment and animal welfare.
Their concerns, however, are not unique.
In British Columbia, where the federal government is pushing to transition salmon farming to close containment facilities, Indigenous leaders and industry experts have repeatedly warned that such a strategy is financially irresponsible, environmentally risky, and socially reckless.
The BC Salmon Farmers Association (BCSFA) says France’s proposed moratorium on land-based salmon farms should serve as a wake-up call for Ottawa, which plans to shut down all ocean-based salmon farming in British Columbia by 2029 and replace it with closed-containment systems.
If enacted, the ban would eliminate BC’s top agri-food export and destroy 4,560 jobs. Additionally, it’s projected to leave taxpayers liable for $9 billion in compensation to existing salmon farmers, suppliers, and First Nations.
Unlike BC activists, who promote land-based salmon farming without firsthand experience of its limitations, industry leaders and government reports alike have cautioned that the technology remains unproven, costly, and not yet scalable for commercial production.
Johan Andreassen, co-founder of Atlantic Sapphire—the company often held up by anti-ocean fish farming activists in BC as a land-based success story—recently warned that growing fish on land doesn’t make dollars or sense in today’s economic climate.
Since its inception in 2017, Atlantic Sapphire has suffered a series of technological and biological setbacks, including mass fish mortalities, system malfunctions, and escalating operational costs, which have delayed production targets and shaken investor confidence.
Despite raising hundreds of millions and branding itself as the world’s largest land-based salmon farm, Atlantic Sapphire has struggled to scale amid the immense challenges of replicating ocean conditions on land.
Kuterra, a pioneering land-based fish farming operation in British Columbia, which is frequently cited by activists, has also voiced concerns, stating that the plan to ban net-pen farms on Canada’s west coast would be harmful to the growth of closed-containment aquaculture in the region.
“A full stop removal of the net pen salmon farms in British Columbia would be disastrous for the whole industry because the resources that exist to support the net-pen salmon farms are also important for land-based salmon farmers,” said Cody Smith, General Manager of Kuterra, which operates in collaboration with the Namgis First Nation.
Global fisheries, aquaculture, and climate scientists have strongly criticized the push to move all salmon farms in British Columbia onto land within five years. They warn that scaling up global land-based salmon farming would demand an annual energy supply equivalent to powering a city of 1.2 million people, while also significantly increasing CO₂ emissions.
Growing Atlantic salmon in land-based systems costs up to 12 times more than conventional ocean farming, experts note.
A recent study projected that transitioning all current salmon production on Vancouver Island to land-based tanks would generate an additional 22.8 million kilograms of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions annually, comparable to the energy consumption of a city the size of North Vancouver.
A BC government-commissioned report further concluded that replacing the province’s current ocean-based salmon farming output with recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) would require a direct capital investment between $1.8 billion and $2.2 billion. The report also estimated that a commercially viable land-based salmon farming industry would likely take at least a decade to develop at scale.
These findings mirror the conclusions of a previous BC government study—The State of Salmon Aquaculture Technologies—released in 2020, which warned that RAS facilities consume large volumes of land, water, and electricity, resulting in a substantial environmental footprint, particularly in the form of greenhouse gas emissions.
The BC Coalition of First Nations for Finfish Stewardship (FNFFS) has unequivocally rejected land-based salmon farming as a viable solution.
“Some Nations in this coalition have completed feasibility studies on land-based salmon farming in their territories for many years, and they came to the same result: it is not possible, and if it was, they would have moved to land-based salmon farming years ago,” FNFFS said.
Main image is a rendering of Pure Salmon’s proposed land-based fish farm facility in Verdon-sur-Mer Image: Pure Salmon website