DUTCH-owned Marine Harvest (Scotland), the country's largest fish farm company, has been warned by a government think-tank to guard against importing in its wild salmon egg stocks a parasite that could devastate the country's freshwater fishing industry and affect several thousand jobs.
A Scottish Executive working group met for the first time last week to discuss the future of the sector, when Marine Harvest and the threat of freshwater parasite gyrodactylus salaris was top of its agenda.
The Netherlands-based group, the larges
t fish farm company in the world, is of particular concern because it recently closed down four Atlantic salmon egg-producing hatcheries, in Lewis, Uist, Skye and Mallaig, plus a processing plant on the island of Scalpay, off Harris.
The closures form part of an international cost-cutting exercise to shut facilities and merge fish farms, in a bid to compete with rivals in Norway and as far away as Chile.
This has led to the loss of 170 jobs across the Highlands and Western Isles, leaving 430 staff in the group's Scottish operation.
The fear now is that the firm will buy in mass volumes of salmon eggs from Norwegian fish farms and unwittingly bring the parasite to Scotland.
Originally coming from the Baltic Sea, the bug has been responsible for wiping out fish in more than 40 rivers throughout Norway, and is also prevalent in Germany, Spain, France and Denmark.
The Executive's working group has been established specifically to combat the potential threat of the parasite. Chairman Arthur Griffiths warned: "It affects the skin, gills and fins of salmon and trout and is invariably fatal.
"It could get here in two ways: from infected fish stocks or on contaminated fishing equipment used in freshwater rivers and lochs."
The Executive has on its stocks a draft fisheries bill designed to ban any fish imports from infected areas, but Griffiths revealed it is not due to come into force until 2006.
Bruce Sandison, chairman of Sutherland-based Fish Farm Protest Group, told the think-tank: "The sensible precaution is to ban all Norwegian fish egg stocks imports now.
"This is especially the case when Marine Harvest intends to close down their Scottish hatcheries, and start importing exclusively eggs from Norwegian salmon. I think that is playing with fire and inviting disaster to the Scottish freshwater fishing industry."
Marine Harvest farms fish on five continents and sells in more than 70 countries. No one at the company's Scottish office at Ratho was available for comment on Friday.
