Chile's battle with infectious salmon anemia (ISA) forced one of the country's largest farmed salmon producers on Wednesday to lay off 450 workers at its Puerto Montt-area processing facilities.
AquaChile said in a press release that the decision to cut the jobs was "extremely painful" but "inevitable."
Chile faces a significant drop in its farmed salmon production this year due to ISA, an influenza-like virus that afflicts fish but not humans.
"We strongly believe that with new regulations and the necessary discipline and coordination of the [farmed salmon] industry, we [will] recover lost production and thus re-employ our [dismissed] workers," said AquaChile general manager Alfonso Marquez de la Plata.
News of the AquaChile layoffs come as Marine Harvest, the world's largest farmed salmon producer, announced that it halved its number of active farmed salmon sites in Chile from 22 to 11 in the first quarter of 2009.
April 15, 2009
