March 26, 2024 — Cooke Chile, the Chilean aquaculture branch of Canadian seafood firm Cooke, has begun to harvest what it says is the country’s first organically farmed Atlantic salmon.
The organic salmon has been certified under regulations from the European Commission and Great Britain for sale in the European Union. The company said production will initially make up a quarter of Cooke’s total salmon production in Chile.
June 2, 2022 –Chile will look to replace its existing fishing laws, while also strengthen environmental stewardship in the ocean, President Gabriel Boric, who took office in March, said in his first address to the nation on 1 June 2022.
“In terms of fisheries and aquaculture, we will fulfill our commitment to advance in a new law, which will be free of corruption and the result of an open and transparent debate. One that delivers clear, fair, and sustainable rules, both at an industrial and artisanal level,” Boric said during the televised speech from Chile’s Congress.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource
June 1, 2022 — Puerto Montt, Chile-based salmon farmer Multi X, which reported the death of 300,000 fish at one of its farms on 22 May, has revised the number downward to 250,000 fish totaling 1,075 metric tons (MT), Chile’s National Fisheries and Aquaculture Service, Sernapesca, reported.
The mortality was associated with a decrease in dissolved oxygen content affecting Atlantic salmon at the farmer’s San Luis center in the concession group ACS 1, located in the Reloncaví Estuary in the Los Lagos region. The extraction of all mortality was completed on 22 May and subsequently sent to the Fiordo Austral Holding’s Salmonoil and Los Glaciares reduction plants in Puerto Montt.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource
May 9, 2022 — Chile President Gabriel Boric is reportedly considering a moratorium on the farmed salmon sector that would halt its expansion in the country.
The 36-year-old Boric, the youngest president in Chile’s history, was elected in December 2021 and took office in March 2022. Previously, as a member of Chile’s congress, he questioned the environmental sustainability of the country’s USD 5.2 billion (EUR 4.6 billion) salmon-farming industry. Boric hails from Chile’s southernmost region of Magallanes, where the salmon-farming sector has been expanding its reach.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource
April 12, 2022 — Chile’s constitutional court (TC) has ruled that the presumption of environmental damage from farmed fish escapes is unconstitutional, setting a precedent for the country’s aquaculture sector.
In August 2020, Chile’s Superintendency of the Environment (SMA) levied a CLP 5.3 billion (USD 6.7 million, EUR 5.7 million) fine against Mowi for an incident involving a large-scale escape of over 690,000 fish from its Punta Redonda faming center on Guar Island in the south of the country in July 2018. In December of the same year, Chile’s Council for the Defense of the State (CDE) followed that up with a lawsuit filed with the third environmental court against Mowi Chile, seeking action by the salmon farmer to rectify the large-scale escape. At the time, CDE said that the event had caused “irreparable environmental damage,” as the farmer had failed to maintain “the appropriate security conditions and cultivation elements of optimal quality and resistance.”
Read the full story at SeafoodSource
April 30, 2021 — Global Fishing Watch (GFW) has signed an agreement with Brazil to publish its vessel-tracking data.
Brazil is the sixth Latin American nation to sign a data-sharing agreement with GFW, a partnership between Google and the advocacy groups Oceana and SkyTruth, joining Peru, Panama, Chile, Ecuador, and Costa Rica.
March 23, 2021 — The U.S. should consider leading a multilateral coalition with South American nations to push back against China’s illegal fishing and trade practices, a U.S. intelligence agency has recommended in a document obtained by Axios.
Why it matters: China’s illegal fishing industry is the largest in the world. Beijing has made distant-water fishing a geopolitical priority, viewing private Chinese fishing fleets as a way to extend state power far beyond its coasts.
What’s happening: Huge fleets of hundreds of Chinese vessels have had boats fish illegally in the territorial waters of South American countries, including off the Galapagos Islands.
January 28, 2021 — COVID-19 outbreaks in seafood processing plants in Alaska and Chile have highlighted how the virus is still wreaking havoc on the global seafood industry, more than a year after the first cases were reported outside of China.
Despite hopes that the start of vaccination efforts in the U.S. and elsewhere might eventually bring an end to the problems the virus has caused, the seafood industry is still treading carefully, trying to thread the needle between worker safety and maintaining profitability – or at least solvency.
November 5, 2020 — Four South American countries have joined forces in a bid to combat illegal fishing by huge Chinese fleets off their coasts.
Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru have threatened measures “to prevent, discourage and jointly confront” illegal fishing near their exclusive economic zones in the Pacific.
The joint statement made no specific mention of China but environmental groups Greenpeace and Oceana have repeatedly warned of the growing presence of Chinese fishing fleets in the area.
The South American quartet said they would boost “cooperation and real-time exchange of information” to highlight the illegal fishing.
Ecuador in July complained to China over a 300-vessel fleet off Galapagos, saying around half of them had turned off their tracking systems so they could not be located.
November 2, 2020 — China’s economic predation is back, this time in some of the most ecologically sensitive waters in the world—in the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, in Peru, and soon, the waters off Chile. In just one month, according to a report by Oceana, a marine conservation group, an armada of nearly 300 vessels spent an eye-popping 73,000 hours fishing off Galápagos. Far from a Chinese voyage of the HMS Beagle, the fleet is a brazen violation of norms around environmental protection and sustainable fishing (and sometimes sovereignty) and an attempt to plunder resources to meet growing Chinese demand. Chinese fishing could potentially wipe out vulnerable local communities that depend on the sea as a source of sustenance and livelihood. In turn, Latin American countries, along with the United States, must increase the menu of options available to monitor and deter this behavior.
It should surprise nobody that China’s distant-water fleet is now ambling about off the Pacific coast of South America. China’s fishing fleets form a nearly ubiquitous presence in the South China Sea and are also frequently found off the west coast of Africa. Visits to South American waters have likewise increased in recent years. The area is rich in fish populations because it benefits from the famous Humboldt Current, which carries nutrient-rich water from Chile all the way to the shores of southern Ecuador. Even as China’s waters suffer from depleted stockpiles, the Chinese public’s growing appetite for seafood has forced the Chinese Communist Party to search for solutions to secure its supply. Today, consumption there represents one-third of the world total. In turn, the country has had to look for fish stocks further afield—with devastating environmental consequences.