You are of course correct, but getting support from the public is essential if you wish to conserve effectively. Seems from your post that Norway has managed it – that's good We have not.

This is a debate with no solution.

The introduction of fish farms originally had a beneficial effect as I once argued that it would in T&S about 30 years ago. My reasoning was that the vastly increased supply of salmon would result in it becoming as cheap as chicken and this would take the pressure off the wild fish as poaching would become uneconomic. This eventually happened with the penalties for poaching exceeding the likely returns and this was because at the time people were happy just to eat cheap salmon and the wild fish were not attracting a premium, a salmon (any salmon) was worth £5 instead of the £30 of a few years earlier. I also argued for a complete ban on the sale of wild salmon but this did not happen.

After maybe ten years of cheap fish we then found out that farmed salmon were not all that good for us (or the environment) and wild fish started to attract a premium. This is exactly the same situation as chicken, we all know that the taste is rubbish, the birds are kept in inhumane conditions but 95% of us buy battery (cheap) chickens partly for economic reasons as free range birds can cost 10 x as much as a battery bird and partly through ignorance as most people don't give a monkey's about the way chicken are reared....any more than they care about farmed/wild salmon or the effect of monoculture fish farms on the environment.

For the demise of the farmed salmon the supply of the demand of the public for salmon will have to be replaced by wild salmon and there's the rub because the wild population is still not enough to anywhere near support that sort of pressure so it's farmed salmon or no salmon for Joe Public and given the choice it will be farmed salmon.

Ecomonics are also the reason why the Wye has not been closed. With rod revenues of up to £75k for a good lower river beat, even with the dire catches of the present day, not many riparian owners will give up that revenue for five years (and it will have to be a minimum of five years) unless they are forced to. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 16th June C&R period as most Wye salmon run before July. There are a couple of exceptions, the Duke of Beaufort introduced a fly and spinning only rule and a three fish per day limit (laughable now) as far back as 1980 but he was very much alone as the beats downstream were worming away just to give rods travelling from London something to take home and guarantee a tip for the ghillie.

The Wye should be closed - last year's catch of 378 should have been the last straw - but it would take many years of no fishing to have an impact and who is going to fund the recovery? Not the riparian owners as they will be taking huge losses anyway, not the anglers - they will be fishing elsewhere, not the EA - they have no funds - well who then? Answer - no-one they will run a five year closure then have another couple of years analaysing data and then maybe decide that funding is required and by then it will be too late.

One thing is clear the Wye's problem is river specific and we don't even know what the problem is for sure.

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“There is no more lovely country than Monmouthshire in early spring. Nowhere do the larks sing quite so passionately, as if somehow inspired by the Welsh themselves. There is a blackbird on every thorn and a cock chaffinch, a twink as they call him there, on every bush...... It moved me profoundly. I had been spared to see another spring, and I thank God for it.”

Oliver Kite
“A Spring Day on the Usk”
A Fisherman’s Diary

sewinbasher, that post is pretty much spot on. I don’t believe though that the public buy farmed salmon because they crave salmon. They buy it because it is dirt cheap, just like chicken. Price is all that matters. If the environmental costs were factored in and the price increased accordingly the punters would look for another cheap protein to replace it. I may be wrong but I don’t believe for one minute a lack of farmed salmon would lead to great increase in demand for wild fish.

I agree, if the price of salmon was to increase then some of those that currently buy it just because it was cheap rather than because they like salmon would buy something else instead. Those that like salmon would continue to buy for a while until the price reached their personal limit. It's a concept called elasticity of demand.

There would be some increase in demand for farmed salmon from those who like eating salmon and are prepared to pay a little more, it's difficult to say how much but certainly not anywhere close to the current demand for farmed fish. However my main point was that to 95% of Joe Public salmon is just a cheap food that tastes fairly nice and as you say, this is also how chicken is perceived except that it doesn't taste all that great.

If the amount of battery reared chicken sold in the UK is any indication of public concern over either rearing methods, nutritional value, taste or chemical content, they don't care a jot about it and chicken farming has a much higher public profile than salmon farming.

One therefore has to conclude that the fate of wild slamon and its relationship to farming salmon is sadly going to be of even less concern if that were possible.

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“There is no more lovely country than Monmouthshire in early spring. Nowhere do the larks sing quite so passionately, as if somehow inspired by the Welsh themselves. There is a blackbird on every thorn and a cock chaffinch, a twink as they call him there, on every bush...... It moved me profoundly. I had been spared to see another spring, and I thank God for it.”

Oliver Kite
“A Spring Day on the Usk”
A Fisherman’s Diary

I'm sorry I haven't responded earlier but I haven't been on the site for some time. Unfortunately I didn't see the useful comments here before I had to file my column so used a broad summary based on an entry I found in The Atlantic Salmon Atlas by Roy Arris and Malcolm Greenhalgh. They blamed the decline on "over-netting on the high seas, and much closer to home, coupled with the effects of acid rain." They described the curtailment of fishing in 1992 as "too little too late."