Chamber and committees

What would be the barriers to that? What do we need to happen to get that kind of good practice happening here?

There was a situation on one farm where, apparently, at the end of the fish being harvested, there were 182,000 lumpfish and 31,000 wrasse that just—

Who, then, would be responsible for keeping track of that? Given that the fish will replace the chemicals that you had been monitoring, who will monitor the use of lumpfish and wrasse?

So, it would sit under the marine directorate.

What are your thoughts on that quotation from the REC report about the highest international industry standards?

We have heard that, during the spring, Norway has a strict count of 0.2 female sea lice per fish. Why do we not take that approach? I know you said that Scotland sets its own approach, but the level here seems to be 30 times higher than the precautionary level in Norway.

That is interesting, is it not? It is tricky, because there are different actions for existing sites. Some things—maybe sea lice things—are rolled out on existing sites, but the emamectin benzoate standard will not be rolled out, because we are waiting for the Scottish Government—

Yes, I understand that, but I am most interested in existing sites, where that has not happened yet, because we are waiting for—

Edward Mountain may know more about this than I do, and he will have questions later, but, overall, some of the trigger is around the polluting effects of the industry. We are talking about solid waste, bath chemicals and pesticides, and that is what we are trying to reduce. That is a tricky thing. It comes back to the question that the convener or Rachael Hamilton asked about how we balance the expansion of the industry while we are trying to address its environmental impacts.

There will inevitably be more solid waste, because we are expanding the number of fish in the cages and the amount of chemicals and pesticides that need to be used to mitigate various problems such as sea lice is also expanding, although I understand—we will get on to a question about this soon—that there are attempts to use fewer chemicals and pesticides through using cleaner fish. That is what we are trying to do, and that is a challenging thing.

Do you want to name anything specific?

Could you just unpack the areas that are known, as hazy as they are?