Controversy simmers after Marine Harvest leaves SalmonChile

The controversial nature of proposed government regulations on the salmon farming industry in Chile was exposed earlier this week as Marine Harvest Chile  decided to withdraw from salmon farming association SalmonChile in protest.

For the past six months, the government of Chile and SalmonChile have jointly been developing the new rules, which aim to improve governance of the industry. The final rules will be announced imminently, Felipe Manterola, general manager of SalmonChile, told SeafoodSource. 

The new rules establish production limits based on load capacity, determined by the sanitary and environmental performance of farms. The regulations will change productive periods from 21 months of production plus three months of fallow period, to a scheme of 45 months of production plus three months of fallow.

“This measure will prevent peaks in biomass that result in sanitary problems, flattening production,” Manterola said.

The regulations also include a voluntary system in which each company can reduce fish stocking for concessions within the same neighborhood, encouraging companies to increase the scale of production in locations where they already have a footprint and to reduce the number of individual pens in its farming concessions. The rules also extend the allowable footprint of salmon farming areas to allow more distance between individual sites.

However, in protest of the proposed new rules, Marine Harvest announced on 26 July that it will leave SalmonChile. Per-Roar Gjerde, managing director Marine Harvest Chile, told SeafoodSource that the company will depart the organization because they can’t agree on key factors of the future regulations.

“When we don’t agree on this [key factors], it is better for both parties that we leave the organization. More than ever, the Chilean industry is in need of smarter, stricter and predictable regulations. The Chilean aquaculture industry is not sustainable. This has to change. Salmon farming could be the most important industry in the future, and Marine Harvest Chile will continue to advocate for stronger regulations,” Gjerde said.

Manterola said Marine Harvest’s exit from SalmonChile "will damage the entire industry’s ability to improve fish farming regulations,” especially since Marine Harvest agrees with SalmonChile on most points, with only one major disagreement about the new regulations.

“The only point Marine Harvest doesn’t share with us is the distribution criteria. The government criteria of distribution is based on the sanitary performance of each company, taking as the starting point the last production of the license,” he said.

Marine Harvest wants a distribution model based on the proportion of licenses of each company, according to Manterola.

“Chile has 1,300 licenses and we are using somewhere in the range of 400, a little less," Manterola said. "In this productive model, we all want to set a load consistent with the capacity of the environment, so you have to find a way to distribute the production among the different players based on [certain] criteria, but that is not a sustainability matter."

However, Gjerde said that regulations have to be “smart and easy to enforce.” Instead of the current proposal, the future regulations, according to Gjerde, should be:

  1. Decide on a sustainable total biomass of salmon for the entire country (for example: 400,000 tons).
  2. Divide this by the countries’ 1,300 licenses (308 ton per license).
  3. Split location from license, and a make sure a license has the right to produce 308 tons. One location can have multiple licenses. “This will reduce the number of locations, and give bigger distance between locations,” Gjerde said.
  4. Agree on biological indicators, like level of caligus [a genus of sea lice] and a low level of usage of antibiotics. “Future growth or reduction should be based on performance according to the biological indicators. This could be based on performance per site, and no more than three percent per year,” Gjerde said.

Gjerde said he disagrees with Sandoval’s assessment that SalmonChile will be hurt by Marine Harvest’s abandonment of it.

“Contrary to what SalmonChile has said, we do not think our decision about leaving [SalmonChile] and advocating for better regulations will damage the reputation of the industry,” Gjerde said. “We agree with the politicians and others calling on smarter and stricter regulations, and we will continue the work for a more sustainable industry in Chile.”

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