MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Growing resistance in Chile to salmon industry impacts

Fed up with what they claim to be environmentally destructive practices by Chile's 2.2 billion US dollars farmed salmon industry, a group of local fishermen in far southern Chile's Region XI is set to launch an international boycott of Chilean farmed salmon.

The group, the Association of Aysén Artisan Fisher Organizations (AGO), plans to begin its boycott this week and is calling on support from environmental organizations both in Chile and abroad. The rapid growth of Chile's farmed salmon industry, the AGO said in a press release, "is the worst environmental and social tragedy to have ever occurred in Region X". Roughly 70% of all Chilean farmed salmon production takes place in Region X, where industry is a cornerstone of the local economy. But while salmon companies have brought jobs to the region, they have also introduced numerous environmental problems, the industry's many critics claim. After posting huge and sustained production increases for many years, Chile's salmon industry has slowed of late, due in large part to an outbreak of Infectious Salmon Anemia (ISA) that over the past 12 months has spread throughout the country's southernmost regions. ISA is a highly contagious virus that can be lethal to fish, but does not affect humans. The ISA outbreak, which began in Chile's Region X, has prompted salmon companies to look south – toward the clean and relatively disease-free waters of Regions XI, Aysén and XII, Magallanes. The pending shift has raised alarm bells among both local and national environmental and social groups, which one by one have called on the government to cease issuing new aquaculture concessions. Puerto Aysén's AGO was one of the first such groups to demand a so-called "moratorium." Other organizations calling for a halt to the industry's southward expansion include Fundación Terram, Oxfam Chile, the Valparaíso-based National Confederation of Artisan Fishermen (CONAPACH) and, most recently, Oceana. Groups in Region XII have also begun organizing against the salmon industry. Just last week, the Punta Arenas-based Association of Magallanes Tourism Companies (AUSTROCHILE) issued its own moratorium demand. "Our concern is that the tourist areas could be erased from the map by the farmed salmon industry. It's even more troubling considering that for the past decade, we've been trying to develop nautical tourism, which depends specifically on the beauty of our fjords and canals," AUSTROCHILE head Jorge Norambuena told Ecoceanos News. The Santiago Times