Tassal salmon: Cooke $1.1b takeover vote sparks Tasmania environmental concerns
Canadian company Cooke Aquaculture has acquired Tasmanian salmon producer Tassal in a $1.1 billion deal that has sparked backlash from environmental groups and local residents.
Tassal shareholders met in Melbourne on Thursday where they voted overwhelmingly to approve the takeover, first announced in August, handing over Australia’s last major salmon producer to foreign ownership.
The ASX-listed firm had encouraged shareholders to vote for the $5.23 per share offer, saying it represented a 49 per cent premium to Tassal’s closing share price on June 22, 2022.
Conservation groups including the Bob Brown Foundation and SumOfUs held protests outside the meeting over Cooke’s history of environmental breaches.
But the multinational firm has dismissed the concerns as “fearmongering”.
“Cooke is looking to take over Tassal because the Tasmanian government is more than happy to allow the destruction of our beautiful rivers, bays and ocean for profit,” Bob Brown Foundation fish farm campaigner Alistair Allan said in a statement on Thursday.
“Despite a growing global movement of salmon farming being banned or phased out, Tasmania is opening the door to this environmental vandal. Tassal has shown Cooke that you can get away with anything, whether that be killing seals, or destroying entire ecosystems, as they did in Macquarie Harbour in 2018.”
He added, “Eating farmed salmon is killing Tasmania, as the folks gathered here in Melbourne know. I urge all Australians to take farmed Tasmanian salmon off the menu this summer.”
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Shareholders will be handed an open letter from Global Salmon Farming Resistance, a group of nearly 30 organisations committed to ending “unsustainable ocean-based net pen salmon farming”.
The letter, which was published in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review on Wednesday, raised concerns about Cooke’s “long history” of environmental breaches.
Emma Helverson from Wild Fish Conservancy in the US was quoted in the letter claiming Cooke had “habitually used litigation and legal threats to avoid accountability for violating environmental laws and to influence the decision-making process of legislators, government officials and members of the public” while operating in Washington state.
“I hope Tasmania will not make the same mistake as Washington,” she said.
Cooke, the world’s sixth-largest farmed salmon producer at 115,000 metric tonnes per year, would move into the top five with 155,000 metric tonnes after the Tassal takeover.
“Don’t be fooled by Cooke Inc.’s marketing,” the letter said.
“This is not a ‘ma and pa’ operation. Cooke Inc. is the family-owned empire you don’t want in your waters or communities. Wherever Cooke Inc. operates – from North America to Chile to Scotland – communities, First Nations and local fisheries are struggling to coexist with salmon farming. Why? The public record for Cooke Inc. and their subsidiaries shows a long history of violations, environmental damage and a general disregard for regulations.”
The letter said Cooke and its subsidiaries had been fined nearly $US13 million ($20 million) since 2000 for “environmental, workplace health and safety, false claims and financial violations under US law”.
It noted Cooke had been fined for the use of banned pesticide cypermethrin in Canada, and failure to report shooting deaths of seals in Scotland, among other breaches.
“Tasmania, we stand with you and we urge Premier Jeremy Rockliff and [Primary Industries] Minister Jo Palmer to act – now,” the letter said. “Get the pens out before Tasmania gets Cooked.”
The letter called on the Tasmanian Government to implement recommendation number three of the Legislative Council Fin Fish Enquiry report, to “develop a plan, in consultation with industry, scientific and community stakeholders, to reduce inshore fin fish farming sites, with priority given to ceasing operations in sensitive, sheltered and biodiverse areas”.
Guy Barnett, Tasmania’s State Development Minister, was asked about the community’s environmental concerns at a media conference on Thursday.
“What is important for this government is our support for a sustainable, highly regulated salmon industry in Tasmania, and the jobs it delivers particularly in the rural and regional parts of Tasmania,” he said.
“As an island state this is really important. We back it in and have been backing in and will continue to do so.”
Speaking to the ABC, Tasmanian local Suzy Manigan said she had seen the environmental impact of Tassal’s salmon farming in Petcheys Bay over the last 30 years.
“When we first moved, we’d see dolphins swimming up the river every single day, and seals and penguins,” she said.
“We don’t see them anymore. It used to be a beautiful walk around the river. Now it’s all algae, you just can’t walk on it. Tassal told us they were trading river leases for channel leases, that this wouldn’t be long term. They left for a time, but then they returned, again telling us it was temporary. But that was several years ago.”
The broadcaster noted that there had been no independent reports on the water quality in Petcheys Bay in Tasmania’s southeast, and that Tassal said salmon farming had low environmental impact.
“We fully anticipated these fearmongering activists would ramp up their rhetoric and disinformation during the acquisition process of Tassal,” Joel Richardson, vice president of public relations at Cooke, told news.com.au in an email on Thursday.
“These groups ignore the fact that farm-raised Atlantic salmon is one of the healthiest and most efficient ways to feed the world’s growing population with a minimal environmental footprint,” he said.
“The aquaculture industry works closely with world-renowned scientists from academia, government and the private sector to develop rigorous standards and implement best practices for fish health and environmental protection.”
Mr Richardson said Cooke had “full confidence” in the 1700 employees at Tassal and the “hundreds of small and medium-sized local businesses in the Tasmanian and Australian aquaculture supply chain”.
“They have built a seafood production business based on sound science, sustainable practices and a deep commitment to rural social and economic development,” he said.
“We intend to continue that work, making strategic investments in engineering, science and technology to further enhance Tassal’s capabilities. Contrary to what these activists claim, Cooke has been named as one of the top 25 seafood suppliers in North America for sustainability and conservation and has been recognised for 17 years as one of Canada’s best managed companies.”
Bob Brown Foundation activists have previously attempted to disrupt Tassal’s salmon operations, climbing aboard pens in Long Bay in August to prevent a large ship from transferring live fish into the enclosures.
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“We had a three-hour period in which the [environmentalists] out there kept this 4000-tonne ship full of fish ready to be dumped into Long Bay, at bay,” Bob Brown told The Mercury at the time.
“Long Bay is one of the most beautiful little coves in Tasmania and that’s saying something. Now they’re going to return salmon into those pens and through that process, [return] tonnes of fish faeces into this already largely destroyed marine ecosystem.”
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