The Washington Post
Sunday 02 December 2007
Methods of salmon industry threaten the very purity it vaunts, critics say.
Puerto Montt, Chile - Newcomers to Patagonia can't even make it out of the airport here without encountering a stunning view of sparkling Lake Llanquihue, with the snow-peaked cone of Osorno volcano rising in the background.
It's a huge photograph hanging in the terminal, actually, and the buoys pictured floating in the glassy water give away its intent: It's an ad for commercial salmon farming, which has become the economic backbone of Patagonia's lakes region.
The salmon industry barely existed here 20 years ago, but the same crystal waters and unspoiled vistas that help power the region's booming tourist industry caught the attention of seafood producers. Now, when diners in the United States cut into a salmon fillet, odds are that the fish matured in one of the net pens constructed in this region's waters.
Spurred partly by a U.S. appetite for salmon that has quadrupled in the past decade, the massive growth of the local salmon industry now has some fearing that its best marketing tool - that fabled Patagonian purity - isn't quite what it used to be.
"The irony is that the same thing that caused the salmon producers to come here in the first place - the pristine quality of the lakes - is now being lost because of the production of salmon," said Jorge León-Muñoz, who co-wrote a World Wildlife Fund report detailing some of the industry's effects on the environment.
Using a clear plastic tube to bore into lakebeds, scientists can plainly view the problem. Round pellets - the fish-based food that is fed to the salmon - have fallen to the lakebeds unconsumed and ended up buried in the dirt. Those pellets, combined with the salmon's feces, add nutrients to the water that spur plankton growth and deplete oxygen, which can make the water unlivable for many native fish.
"You see species of algae and types of bacteria that weren't there before," said Guiliana Furci, a salmon specialist with Terram, a Santiago-based environmental research institute. "There's a huge organic input in the lakes."
According to official statistics, evidence of oxygen deficiency was found at 20 percent of salmon farms operating on Chile's lakes between 2003 and 2005.
Fishing companies use net pens in the freshwater lakes - as well as rivers and estuaries - to raise smolt, or young salmon, before moving them to saltwater facilities to mature. Because some of the salmon get loose from the net pens, their population in the lakes has increased at the expense of native species, most of which are much smaller. According to the World Wildlife Fund, 93 percent of native fish species in the lakes are classified as vulnerable or threatened, and 40 percent are considered endangered.
Above the water's surface, it is still incredibly easy to find natural beauty without much effort. Flowered fields stretch into snow-capped mountains, and broad blue skies are mirrored by lakes scattered liberally for miles near the Pacific coastline.
At the same time, the salmon industry is impossible to ignore in the region's population centers. Recently in this port city, for example, a newly built hotel was filled with scientists attending a conference on aquaculture biology. On the road heading south out of town, ice-packing plants line the roadway. About an hour away, the smell of fish thickens the air outside of Calbuco, a town of about 12,000 people.
Calbuco has grown 50 percent since 1991 thanks to the salmon industry, according to municipal officials. As in many other towns in the region, unemployment is down and incomes are up. About 30 percent of the region's residents - an estimated 53,000 people - are directly employed by salmon farms, according to local officials. Because many salmon plant workers are women, newly built day-care facilities have popped up to accommodate their children.
Manuel Viveros, 39, has worked for 12 years at an installation designed to fatten salmon. When his daughter recently graduated with a social science degree and couldn't find a job, she also turned to salmon, working on a quality-control line in one of the plants.
Like a lot of locals, he praises the salmon industry for improving the quality of life - even as he tells stories about how he and his family have changed some of their eating habits because they believe the waters aren't as clean as they used to be.
"Before, we could eat seafood raw, and we did it all the time," he said. "But we don't do that anymore. Everything has to be cooked."
The potential risks of using the lakes to raise smolt have long been known, and the Chilean government stopped issuing concessions for smolt production in lakes in the early 1990s. But existing concessions were allowed to continue operating, and the total production of smolt in those areas has doubled since 1998, according to the World Wildlife Fund study.
Additionally, the Chilean branch of the environmental group Oceana suggested in 2005 that salmon operations in the sea were responsible for red tide - the growth of damaging ocean algae. The widespread use of antibiotics in salmon farms has also attracted criticism within Chile.
The salmon producers counter that it is in their interest to promote sound environmental practices, and the country's trade group - SalmonChile - attributes the industry's success to its international reputation for imposing high standards on itself.
"The industry has had the capacity to create and implement its own standards, which go one step further than the sanitary and environmental demands of our country, with the aim of anticipating the needs of the most demanding markets of the world," according to a statement from SalmonChile.
Even many of those who bemoan the effects of salmon farming in Chile acknowledge that's true - but they say it's because Chilean government regulations are weaker than those of many other salmon-producing countries.
"Norwegian seafood companies come to Chile and do things they'd never get away with at home," said Dave Bard of the National Environmental Trust's Pure Salmon Campaign in Washington.
Stefan Woelfl, a scientist at the Austral University of Chile in Valdivia, has conducted numerous studies of the region's lakes to determine the environmental impacts of salmon farming, which he described as serious.
"But if I find problems in a lake, I don't direct my complaints toward the company - I direct the complaint to the government," Woelfl said. "The company didn't do anything wrong according to the law. It's the state that is allowing it to happen."
The World Wildlife Fund report urged the companies to move all smolt-producing operations out of lakes and into contained, land-based facilities that the group says would diminish environmental impacts significantly. Such systems are already in use in most other salmon-producing countries and are just beginning to be used in Chile.
"The problem looks severe, and it is definitely serious, but the good news is that there is a remedy that is proven to be economically effective," said David Tecklin, head of the World Wildlife Fund's program in Chile.
Marine Harvest, the largest seafood company operating in Chile, announced this year that in the coming years it would transfer all of its lake-based smolt operations to land-based systems.
"Unfortunately none of the other companies have chosen to follow suit," Tecklin said.
In addition to pressure from environmental advocates, salmon farms in Chile have faced criticism from the tourism sector, which banks on the same image of an unspoiled Patagonia that salmon producers advertise.
The tourism industry has enjoyed 55 percent growth in the past decade, and the lakes region alone raked in about $116 million in tourism revenue last year. But that's nothing compared with salmon: Annual revenue has jumped from about $538 million to $2.2 billion since 1996. Some tour operators have argued that their industry is losing out to more profitable seafood interests.
"The big impact that we feel is a visual one," said Enrique Pavez, who operates a lake tour company in Puerto Montt. "When a person comes here to enjoy nature and its beauty and sees a salmon pen - that's kind of a shock."
Last week at a university in Puerto Montt, academics and officials from the salmon and tourism industries took turns at a public forum focusing on how both sides might exist compatibly. Such forums have become commonplace as the salmon sector's impacts are increasingly debated.
"Fifteen years ago, absolutely no one here talked about contamination - no one," said Rodrigo Palma, a scientist with Chile's federal agriculture service who studies freshwater systems. "That's a big difference. Today, everyone does."
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