Investigation: How farm fishing boom in Chile threatens eco disaster

Robert Mendick
October 25,2009
The Telegraph (UK)

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. 

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.

Read the full story in The Telegraph (UK)