In his show, Hugo Clément tries to restore “the truth about salmon”, his ravous breeding conditions, his massive and trapping fishing when he tries to return to the waters who saw him born, as Adour.
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At the table and on the screen, it regularly comes back to the approach of the end-of-year treats. Livestock salmon remains a safe bet despite its flesh with artificial color, its cocktail of antibiotics and pesticides intended to relieve sea lice infestations that gangrate it. Its captivity to several tens of thousands of caged congeners gradually keeps away from its cousin, wild salmon, a powerful marathonal capable of embarking on an odyssey of the most risky until Greenland before returning to the waters that have seen born, that of a French river for example. In both cases, the animal has chances to finish as a banal paved on a plate.
The advantage, with documentaries who are looking at the diet of the developed countries is that the viewer is of great opportunities to travel, with the world agribusiness pathways being low penetrable, but still rich in kilometers. Hugo Clément and his team went to search for edifying images in Scottish Lochs, guided by Don Staniford aboard his kayak. This activist has been denounced for twenty years the apparently tolerated terrible breeding conditions in the United Kingdom. “In these cages, there are plastic pollution, rope pieces, fuel tasks, dead fish, shit everywhere …”, summarizes an ex-employee of a fish farm in front of his old place of work .
“Minoter fishing”
The food is brought as bags of granules by a container carrier of the Norwegian firm MOW – one of the world’s global giants and one of the engines of the growth of this industry in Scotland. Even crowded, salmon is a carnivor that is ingesting a dose of soy and quantity of mackerel, herring, sardinelles from Peru or West Africa. This “mining fishing” is reduced in flour and oil, often transformed into Chinese or Russian factories directly installed on the Senegalese or Mauritanian coast. Result, Joal women who smoked these small fish no longer have a resource and their customers lack protein.
Back to France, near Bayonne, where a handful of fishermen roller the latest wild atlantic salmon quite reckless to try to go to spawn in the Adour. Despite the determination of nature defenders, these professionals persist in extending their nets in the mouth of a river that the public authorities nevertheless continues to have fish passes upstream.
History, no doubt, to finish on more positive bucolic images, the documentary takes us slide into canoe in the beautiful gorges of the Allier. With a team of volunteers, Hugo Clement drops several hundred thousands of salmon fry. Once adults, the survivors will come back a day in the river after defeating the rise of the Loire. This year, barely two hundred from these super athletes have been enumerated. The fry come from the National Salmon Conservatory located in Chantfines (Haute-Loire).
At about thirty kilometers away, EDF undertook to open one of its hydroelectric dams, that of poutees on the Allier, three months a year, in order to let the salmon pass. The energetician is proud of this pilot site of nearly 20 million euros admired in Europe. The film does not say that one of its subsidiaries is about to build a new downstream hydroelectric plant, on the Allier, Vichy.