Additional reporting by Oriana Aguillon

Chile’s salmon farming companies in Magallanes are at risk from legislation because lawmakers and other stakeholders know little about the industry, said regional producer association head Oscar Garay. 

A group of companies that started salmon farming operations in Magallanes, a new territory in Chile for farms, need to open their doors to lawmakers and other key stakeholders to show that the industry is doing a good enough job to avoid environmental degradation, Oscar Garay, who leads an association of farmers in the region, told Undercurrent News. 

A group of producers, compromised of Agrosuper’s AquaChile, Australis Seafoods, Blumar, Cermaq Group and Nova Austral, are hoping to win over public support for salmon farming as they ramp up plans to expand in the region located at the southernmost tip of Chile. The group was hit by recent news that Nova Austral concealed mortalities at one site, a step that led to fisheries regulator Sernapesca removing its coveted “antibiotic-free” status to all local farms. 

Nova Austral was also suspended from using the Aquaculture Stewardship Council certification for a four-month period following the incident.  

The “antibiotic-free” branding is key for Magallanes farmers to offset higher operating costs, as they will get higher prices for their fish in the US market. Farmers in Magallanes operate free of salmonid rickettsial syndrome, or SRS, a disease that can only be abated with antibiotic treatments.  

“In terms of our image and our reputation, the only way to revert that is with absolute and total transparency,” Garay told Undercurrent. “Now more than ever we need to manage that the community, the authorities and parliamentarians come and visit and get to know the industry and the high standards that we have developed.”

Magallanes farmers operate better sites because they have benefited from past mistakes made in Chile’s salmon farming industry, in particular in the careful issues of farming sites with adequate currents and placed with larger distances from one site to another, Eugenio Zamorano, Sernapesca’s head of aquaculture, told Undercurrent last year.  

Most companies operating in the region have plans to build smolt hatcheries in the area, which will eventually create a biological firewall between Magallanes and farming sites in Aysen and Los Lagos further to the north. Most industry operators are currently carrying smolt in wellboats through fjords from Los Lagos, a practice that could potentially jeopardize the industry’s sanitary status in Magallanes. Most companies are operating in the interim by deploying veterinary scientists to accompany wellboat trips to the south and taking several water samples while traveling through the fjords. 

The Nova Austral case has damaged the industry’s reputation through negative publicity it generated, Garay said. Nova Austral is currently taking internal measures to correct the problem and will be subject to a government-led investigation, he said [...]