The Chilean branch of salmon-farming firm Cooke Aquaculture has yet again raised concerns it is being discriminated against by Chile’s Superintendency of the Environment (SMA), which the firm claims has affected its operations and for which the company continues to say it may seek international arbitration.
Cooke Chile and the SMA have locked horns for years.
The environmental watchdog has filed charges against Cooke and has accused it of overproducing and operating concessions illegally within the Laguna San Rafael National Park.
In early 2023, Cooke filed a lawsuit asking for relief from the SMA’s mandates.
At the time, Cooke Aquaculture Chile CEO Andrés Parodi said in a letter to Chile Environment Minister Maisa Rojas that SMA’s order to significantly reduce production at its farms is “simply unthinkable from an economic standpoint and would lead to the need to close those centers, besides constituting a regulatory expropriation.”
Parodi recently said that these issues have not gone away.
In several posts on LinkedIn, he lamented regulatory sanctions and measures that the company considers arbitrary, such as the mandated halting of operations at its Huillines 3 growout center, which according to the company has generated significant economic losses.
According to Parodi, when salmon-farming operations began there, the SMA established a minimum amount of salmon production required for each concession. However, in recent years, the watchdog arbitrarily turned that idea on its head and determined that the minimum amount had become the maximum amount of production allowed, according to Cooke...