A recently declassified government document confirms what critics of Chile’s farmed salmon industry have suspected for years: that producers here use far more antibiotics than their counterparts in Norway.
Through Chile’s new public information act, the international environmental NGO Oceana received a Ministry of the Economy report last week detailing that between 2007 and 2008, the Chilean farmed salmon industry used on average 355,000 kilograms of antibiotics per year. The 325,616 kilograms of antibiotics applied last year was almost 350 times the amount used in Norway, Chile’s primary competitor in the farmed salmon market. In 2007, Chilean producers used even more antibiotics: 385,636 kilograms compared to just 600 kilograms in Norway, the document revealed.
The report also suggested that approximately one third of the drugs used in Chile are of the quinolone variety, a type of synthetic antibiotic whose use in food production is outlawed in the United States and other countries that buy Chilean salmon.