Chile, the world’s second biggest exporter of salmon, is struggling with overcrowded farms and rampant disease. The crisis is having a devastating effect on the country’s multi-billion dollar industry and on its workers. Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman reports from Quellon in southern Chile.
Chile is often cited as one of the success stories of globalization and adherence to free-market principles. Within that meme, Chile’s salmon industry is touted as one of the success stories. This is not exactly the case. The Chilean salmon industry was actually created by La Fundación Chile, a non profit corporation created in 1976 through a joint agreement between the Chilean government and ITT Corporation. In the mid-1980s, this quasi-governmental body funded the research that led to the development of Chile’s lucrative salmon business, an industry that last year produced $2.3 billion in export revenues mostly to the United States.
Salmon is not a native species in Chile, but was introduced for farming in the 1980s. Today it is the second most important Chilean export, after copper, and exports had been expected to grow by around 20 percent in the next few years before the problems began to manifest themselves. This year Chile’s exports are expected to decline to $1.8 billion. Still overall Chile is the world’s second-largest exporter of salmon after Norway. Norway accounted for 38.7% of global farmed salmon and Chile produced 37.9% of global farmed salmon in 2006.
Output is now declining, mainly because of the prevalence of diseases among the fish. These include infectious salmon anaemia, a virus that first appeared in Norway in the 1980s but from which Chile had remained free until 2007. According to FIS, a fishing industry organization, some 550 salmon farms in Chile are operating now at only 20% capacity and are actively laying off workers.
Some background from the New York Times:
Chilean government officials and industry officials say the troubles are part of the growing pains of a $2 billion industry that in less than two decades built itself into the world’s second largest exporter and the biggest supplier of salmon to the United States.
The virus afflicting the fish, infectious salmon anemia, or ISA, is not harmful to humans, they note. But after The New York Times reported on Chile’s dying farmed fish last year, some buyers, like the supermarket giant Safeway, restricted imports from Chile.
The troubles spurred the Chilean government to step up its controls. Last year Sernapesca, Chile’s national fishing service, tripled its inspections of farmed fish, said Felix Inostroza, the agency’s director.
Among other things, the measures now being weighed by the Chilean Congress, which are expected to be passed before April, would thin the density of salmon pens, where overcrowding has contributed to the virus’s spread, and reduce the use of antibiotics.
The authorities also plan to organize aquaculture permits into “neighborhoods,” where salmon companies will be required build in rest periods between production cycles, to give the marine environment time to recover, said Rodrigo Infante, general manager of SalmonChile, the industry association.
But environmental groups say they will continue to lobby for tougher changes. “It is not enough for the industry to voluntarily police itself,” said Andrea Kavanagh, manager of the Salmon Aquaculture Reform Campaign for the Pew Environment Group in Washington.
“For too long, the government has ceded to industry convenience,” she added, “permitting chemicals known to harm its environment as well as consumers.”
Her group obtained F.D.A. inspection reports last year in an open records request showing that Chilean producers had used three chemicals that are effectively banned in the United States.
Industry and Chilean government officials say the chemicals are not harmful to consumers when used the right way. “Just because a substance is not allowed for use does not necessarily mean it poses a risk to human health,” said Alicia Gallardo, the head of the Aquaculture unit of Sernapesca.
But Chilean companies have struggled to comply with the regulations of other countries, particularly as they cope with a parasitic bacteria, rickettsia, carried by sea lice, which causes infection-prone lesions.
The industry is using antiparasitic treatments like emamectin benzoate, a pesticide fed to the fish, to treat the lice infestations, and antibiotics to control the resulting infections.
F.D.A. officials said that emamectin could be used in limited cases in the United States, but that it was one of the three prohibited chemicals that were highlighted in F.D.A. inspection documents last April.
The others were oxolinic acid and the antibiotic flumequine, according to the F.D.A. inspection reports recovered by the Pew Environmental Group.
Copies of the documents were shared with The New York Times and their authenticity verified by F.D.A. officials, including Donald Kraemer, the F.D.A.’s deputy director in the office for food safety.