WWF, WTF?

Australian Ethical Investments has sold its Tassal shares because of Tassal's unsustainable practices.

It’s time for WWF to make the long-overdue decision to stop supporting Tassal. This is a company that has turned its largest lease in Macquarie Harbour into a dead zone, where salmon experience sub-lethal and lethal stresses and damage has spread into a World Heritage Area.

Sign our petition below to tell WWF to publicly end its contract with Tassal.

We’re writing to ask you to formally withdraw from your financial relationship with Tassal. Yesterday Australia’s premier ethical investment house, Australian Ethical Investments, confirmed that they have sold their holdings in Tassal, because of concerns regarding the sustainability of Tassal’s practices.
WWF has yet to publicly comment on the latest report by the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, which shows that Tassal’s largest lease in Macquarie Harbour is what fish farming experts refer to as a ‘dead zone’. Recently, Australia’s second largest aquaculture company revealed that this dead zone has spread into the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (WHA), where at the first monitoring point within the WHA boundary, there has been a 97.27 per cent reduction in marine life. WWF has also failed to respond to concerns raised about Tassal’s inshore operations and the fact that the majority of international published research outlines best-practice standards for water temperature, site depth and current speed, which Tassal’s operations do not meet.
In the past, WWF Australia has justified its contract with Tassal by referring to the benefits this alliance delivers, celebrating a reduction in the use of wild fish in Tassal's feed. Unfortunately, research by other conservation groups indicates that this reduction of wild fish in feed happened prior to WWF’s relationship with Tassal and was driven largely by increases in fish oil prices. Our concern about the extent to which WWF's relationship with Tassal has improved feed ratios is echoed in Australian Ethical Investment’s review of Tassal, which found:
“While the wild fish component of salmon feed (typically anchovies) has reduced substantially with the introduction of plant and other feed components, this trend has slowed and in some cases reversed. The sustainability of wild anchovy fisheries is a concern with growing demand for fishmeal feed and fish oil, demand which is also diverting anchovies from their use as a direct source of protein.
Our view on aquaculture has been that it has the potential to reduce over-fishing and move towards a sustainable seafood production by substituting feedstock with plant based protein. Unfortunately, we believe Tassal and the salmon farming sector is not currently on track to achieve this goal.”
While we acknowledge WWF’s commitment to the ASC system as a means of improving corporate behaviour, this does not require an exclusive financial arrangement with, or unqualified endorsement of Tassal. We ask that WWF formally withdraw from this arrangement, in the interests of protecting the integrity of the ASC brand and supporting the efforts of local conservation groups to protect their homes from aquaculture practices the international literature recognises are less than best-practice.

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