Investigation: How farm fishing boom in Chile threatens eco disaster

Separated by an ocean, a continent and more than 7,000 miles, Chile seems an awfully long way to go to find sushi for millions of Britons.

By Robert MendickPublished: 9:30AM GMT 25 Oct 2009
The packaging gives no clue to the origins of the “salmon trout”.
Nor does it make clear the disastrous consequences of intensive fish farming along Chile’s once pristine coastline where, according to eco-activists, many farms are plagued by disease and pollution.

There is, of course, no suggestion that the fish served by Waitrose or Pret a Manger, two of Britain’s most environmentally friendly food suppliers, comes from a farm that has prompted concern.
The rise of Chile’s fish industry began about a decade ago when international corporations realised there was money to be made in the blue water off a short stretch of coast around Puerto Montt, 600 miles south of the capital Santiago.
The explosion in global demand for salmon and trout led to a rapid expansion of the open net fish farming industry, in which fish are kept in pens in the sea.
By the middle of this decade, Chile had become the world’s second largest producer of salmon and trout – after Norway – with a business worth more than £1.2 billion a year.
With labour and energy costs a fraction of those in Norway, Scotland and Canada – average workers in the Chilean fish farming industry earn less than £5,000 a year – Chile’s Pacific coast was making big corporations huge profits. However, environmentalists complained that regulation was not robust enough.
What followed was disaster. In July 2007, Marine Harvest, a Norwegian company that supplies one in four of the world’s salmon, reported its first case on the South American continent of Infectious Salmon Anaemia (ISA), a virus deadly to the fish.
For months, according to insiders, the rest of the industry ignored the threat.
But the lack of robust regulation and the way the farms were packed together with no space for buffer zones allowed the disease to spread.
At one stage, said Jorgen Christiansen, a spokesman for Marine Harvest, about 400,000 tons of salmon – tens of millions of fish – were being harvested in a 75-mile stretch of coast around Puerto Montt. That compared with about 800,000 tons of farmed salmon along 1,900 miles of Norwegian coast.
The conditions have also promoted the spread of bacterial diseases, according to environmental campaigners. One study showed that Chilean salmon contained 5,000 times more antibiotics than Norwegian salmon – an indicator, they say, of how drugs were used to try to keep the fish disease-free. Within a year, ISA – which does not affect the “salmon trout” imported to Britain – had taken its toll, wiping out huge numbers of salmon.
Almost overnight the industry had been brought to its knees with thousands of workers laid off, fish farms lying empty and local waters polluted. This year the industry will export about 150,000 tons of salmon, a huge drop on its peak years.
“These intensive farms are a recipe for eco-disaster,” said Don Staniford, a campaigner for Pure Salmon, who has made a film to be premiered next month about the fish farming industry and its effects on Chile.
“The inherent problem in farming salmon and sea trout in open net pens is that waste is discharged into the sea, it spreads diseases and parasites that impact on local fish stocks. The fish can also escape, causing a huge imbalance with local fish.”
The west London company which imports the Chilean salmon trout told The Sunday Telegraph that it regularly inspected the farm, which has signed up to global regulatory rules.
The fish come from a farm further south than Puerto Montt, in Chonchi, owned by Salmones Antarctica, a once-local company bought out by a Japanese business.
“There are problems with the salmon in Chile but we are importing salmon trout. It’s a completely different species,” said Derek Lewis, spokesman for importer Taiko Foods. “We know there are problems down there [in Chile] but it isn’t our farm and it isn’t our species.”