In a purely economic sense, Chilean salmon farming in recent years has made astounding strides. Since the government began promoting development of the industry here in the mid-1980s, salmon has overtaken copper and wood products as Chile’s top export to the United States. Chile has captured more than half of the U.S. salmon market—and this year it is expected to surpass Norway as the world leader in farmed-salmon production.

All along, however, environmental questions have loomed. And over the past year they have cast a particularly menacing shadow. Last year, European health officials seized shipments of Chilean salmon on grounds the fish meat contained excessive concentrations of a banned fungicide, and Japanese health officials impounded Chilean salmon tainted with antibiotics.

And in the United States, a widely reported scientific study released in January found that traces of various toxic chemicals often turn up in farmed salmon. Meanwhile, media reports have continued to raise environmental and health questions about farmed salmon. Some analysts say the increased coverage contributed to a downturn in U.S. demand for farmed-salmon imports from Chile and Canada during the first three months of the year.

Though such downturns can be short-lived, there’s a growing sense that green concerns could pose a serious long-term threat to the industry’s economic future. In Chile, industry and government officials say they are moving to shore up confidence in the country’s salmon exports. They point to salmon-aquaculture environmental regulations now being phased in and to a more aggressive inspection program. But environmental groups and some industry analysts contend that while improvements are indeed being made, they are neither drastic nor swift enough.

“It’s undeniable that because of recent international pressure, government officials are raising standards and beginning to regulate to prevent more scandals and closed markets,” says Juan Carlos Cárdenas, a biologist and executive director of the Chilean group Ecoceanos, which focuses on marine issues. “But the industry has been continuing to engage in green washing, claiming advances. In reality, they have a long way to go.”

Whatever transpires in the future, 2003 certainly will be a year Chile’s salmon industry would prefer to forget.

In July, health inspectors in The Netherlands detained several shipments of Chilean farmed salmon after they discovered significant traces of malachite green. Originally developed as a synthetic-fabric dye, malachite green was widely used on fish farms to kill parasites and fungus until it was found to be a carcinogen. Though Chile banned use of the chemical in aquaculture in 1995, salmon farms continued to use it illegally.

The action by Dutch officials followed the United Kingdom’s March 2003 impoundment of Chilean salmon found to contain malachite green. Also in March, the European Union issued three food alerts warning about the problem. Altogether, eight of the 16 food alerts that the EU issued about salmon last year concerned malachite green-tainted Chilean fish.

Chilean authorities sanctioned two companies for using malachite green. One was Aqua Chile, the nation’s second-biggest salmon producer. The other was Chile’s top producer—Marine Harvest, which is owned by the Netherlands’ Nutreco, the world’s leading salmon farming company. Both companies deny acting illegally. To the surprise of environmentalists here, the Chilean judge handling the case informed green groups last month that the impounded salmon was released in January and sold in Europe.

“The judge told us that Chilean consumers can relax since the fish would not return to Chile to be sold,” says attorney Luís Mariano Rendon, who represented the Ecoceanos group in a lawsuit aimed at preventing resale of the malachite green-tainted salmon in Chile. “We could not believe it. We thought the contaminated salmon should have been destroyed, but because lots of money was at stake the Chilean government succeeded in pressuring Dutch authorities to release the salmon [for sale in Europe].”

Chilean salmon also ran afoul of regulators in Asia. In September, Japanese health authorities announced that random sampling of Chilean salmon imports turned up excessive levels of oxytetracycline, one of the antibiotics salmon farmers use to fight infections in their fish. A complete ban on Japanese imports of Chilean farmed salmon would not be out of the question, they warned, if such problems continued.

Japan is Chile’s biggest farmed-salmon market; it accounts for about 40% of Chilean exports of the fish, which often is used in sushi. Clearly worried, Chilean officials quickly announced they would boost enforcement by conducting site inspections on salmon farms rather than, as previously, examining fish samples before the salmon are loaded for transport.

As Chilean salmon farmers have contended with bad publicity from the European and Japanese crackdowns, they—and producers in other nations—have had to endure a broader questioning of the safety of farmed salmon. A study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and published in the journal Science in January found “significantly elevated” levels of 13 toxins in farmed salmon when compared with wild salmon.

Chilean farmed salmon, in comparison with farmed salmon in Europe and North America, was found to have elevated concentrations of six toxins—PCBs, dioxins, dieldrin, cis-nonachlor, total DDT and mirex. The study largely blames toxics in salmon-farm feed, and it controversially concludes that young persons or pregnant mothers consuming more than one salmon meal per month could increase their risk of contracting cancer later in life.

Consumer reaction in the United States to the Pew study has been further stoked by media reports of farmed salmon’s shortfalls. The Oregonian newspaper of Portland, Oregon, for example, reported last September that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just 200 inspectors examining over 4 billion tons of seafood products entering the United States every year. Two U.S. green groups, the Center for Environmental Health and the Environmental Working Group, filed a lawsuit in January against 50 salmon producers, fish processors and grocery chains worldwide, claiming the companies are failing to warn consumers of the presence of PCBs and other toxins in the fish meat.

“[T]he alarm bells have gone off,” says Gerald Leape, director of marine conservation programs for the National Environmental Trust, a U.S. green group. “[U.S. citizens] eat a lot of salmon. There is no doubt that they are much more aware of the health risks than they were, say, six months ago.”

Chilean salmon farming has come in for particularly harsh criticism on grounds it is subject to comparatively lax regulation and enforcement. Critics cite the continued use by salmon farms here—at least until last year—of malachite green despite the chemical’s prohibition. They also point out that unlike Norway and Canada, Chile does not regulate use of antibiotics on salmon farms.

Felipe Cabello, a New York Medical College microbiologist who authored a 2002 study on antibiotics in Chilean aquaculture, estimates Chilean salmon farmers use at least 75 times the amount of antibiotics that their Norwegian counterparts do, in most cases for disease prevention rather than treatment. That, he says, reveals “deficiencies in hygiene and technology”—and serious risks.

“There is quite clear evidence, both epidemiological and experimental, that the use of antibiotics in aquaculture may produce a series of alterations in the marine ecology,” Cabello says. “Bacterial populations may be altered and antibiotic-resistant strains could then infect human and animal populations, creating new problems since the antibiotics would then be rendered useless.”

The segregation of sick fish from healthy ones is not practiced in Chile. In Canada, by contrast, salmon producers are required to control salmon epidemics through quarantines, and they’re ordered to slaughter millions of diseased fish. In Chile, diseased fish are often harvested before symptoms occur or before they can be treated, experts say.

And many of the diseases affecting salmon here are due to water contamination caused by salmon farms themselves, which raise fish in freshwater lake and river pens and in large sea cages that occupy coastal inlets.

The Terram Foundation, a sustainable-development think tank here, reported recently that at Chilean salmon farms, 75% of fish feed and tons of feces wind up in the water and in sediment below cages, robbing surrounding marine life of oxygen. Terram estimates the waste released from salmon pens into coastal waters and freshwater lakes and rivers here is equivalent to the untreated organic waste of a human population of 4.6 million people.

Feed is a question

More broadly, there are sustainability questions. Salmon are mainly fed fish meal made from anchovies, herring and fish-processing scrap. According to the Worldwatch Institute, salmon farms in this way intensify pressure on ocean fisheries because up to five tons of wild fish are required to produce each ton of farmed salmon. In Chile, daily fish staples such as jurel (Caranx chrysos) are scarcer due to aquaculture’s demands, exacerbating food-supply pressures in poor communities.

Alex Brown, director of the environment department of Chile’s Fishing Undersecretariat, says the government is doing more than bolstering inspections. He points out that with a two-year phase-in period ending, all salmon companies in Chile now must comply with Chile’s 2001 Aquaculture Environmental Regulations (Rama). The regulations address the monitoring of water quality under cages; the location and depth of cages; and disposal of liquid and solid waste. They also prohibit genetically modified salmon and require environmental-impact studies be conducted before new salmon farms can be built.

Companies unable to comply can be shut down, and those that violate certain regulations such as water-quality rules, must cut production by 30%. “We’re now applying Rama,” Brown says. “It’s a slow process…but the salmon companies are starting to comply with these very strong requirements, and we are now observing changes in the way they produce.”

...and so is enforcement

Yet critics contend undermanned fishing authorities remain woefully slow to enforce regulations. They point to the Oct. 2003 escape of some 130,000 rainbow trout and salmon from a fish farm near Puerto Montt, capital of Chile’s Lakes region. Though Chilean law prohibits releases and requires companies to recover all escaped fish, the company involved, Caleta Bay, was not pressed to act until five days later. Few of the salmon were recovered, and the company was never penalized.

The estuary is the spawning ground of native fish species, some of them endangered, and experts fear escaped farmed salmon scouring local waters for food might crowd out native fish.

“The government is trying to do its best,” says Doris Soto, a marine biologist at Austral University in Puerto Montt. “But it’s not concerned enough with the impacts of salmon on the aquatic environment.”

And as Chile’s salmon industry expands, the government must cover ever more regulatory ground. Ecologists like Juan Carlos Cárdenas are concerned about salmon farming extending southward from Chile’s 10th Region—the lakes area where it’s centered now—into Chile’s 11th Region and Patagonia. Now 20 times as big as it was in 1990, the industry is looking to double production by 2013.

“The salmon industry for 20 years has been ruining the lakes, rivers and coastline,” Cárdenas says. “Chileans can’t afford to continue subsidizing salmon company profits with environmental pollution and cheap labor.”

For their part, salmon-farm operators assert such criticism is overblown. “I really think these campaigns are misleading, and even doing harm to the consumer,” says Torben Petersen, chief executive officer of Fjord Seafood Chile. “Chile is not a highly industrialized country and has very low contamination. The American Heart Association would recommend you eat salmon twice a week.”

—James Langman






A different kettle of fish…

With public concern about farmed salmon on the rise, some Chilean aquaculture companies are working to make their operations more environmentally sound.

None are doing so as aggressively as Fiordo Blanco.

The company, bought in 1995 by Heritage Salmon of Canada,won organic certification for half of its salmon farms in February from the German firm Naturland. So Fiordo Blanco, whose farms are located adjacent to the vast Pumalín Park conservation area in Chaiten, this year will start selling certified salmon to the growing niche market for organic salmon in North America, Europe and Japan.

To obtain organic status, Fiordo Blanco has adopted a rigorous regimen.

Salmon are hatched and kept for up to two years in closed-containment facilities on land rather than in freshwater pens in rivers or lakes, minimizing problems of water pollution and disease.

Once the salmon are in their final, saltwater stage of development, they inhabit sea cages containing slightly more than half the amount of salmon that typically are packed into conventional cages.And the nets are changed once a month to minimize accumulation of bacteria and funguses.

Monitoring devices in the pens are used to prevent the release of excess feed. Sea cucumbers (Holothuroidea) and other waste-eating marine creatures are placed inside and beneath the sea cages to help control contamination.

As for feed, the non-meat portion must be obtained from certified South American providers of organic soy and wheat, while the wild-fish content must come from sustainable sources.

Pigment for the meat (farmed salmon are
not naturally pink as wild salmon are) must be made from natural yeast.

Bill Drope, Fiordo Blanco’s director of operations, says the eco-friendlier approach boosts costs—and, thus, prices to the consumer —by about 50%. But higher prices and the organic practices they support, he suggests, are an essential step in ensuring farmed salmon remains
a viable product.

“There is so much bad press about farmed salmon these days,” he says.“We want to do everything we can to strengthen the argument for [consumers] to buy salmon.”