Chilean authorities have fined Bergen, Norway-headquartered Mowi CLP 7.2 billion (USD 7.5 million, EUR 7.2 million) for a salmon escape incident in 2018, at the same time the company is dealing with a recent escape in Norway.
Mowi first reported an escape incident on 9 February after finding damage to a cage at its Storvika Vest facility in the Dyrøy municipality. According to Norway’s Directorate of Fisheries, the company discovered the damage during a storm.
Mowi has moved and counted the fish left in the affected pen, which led the firm to estimate that approximately 27,000 farmed salmon with an average size of around 5.5 kilograms escaped. The directorate normally requires recapture efforts to take place within a 500-meter area surrounding the affected pen, but given the potential damage resulting from this incident, it instructed Mowi to widen its recapture efforts.
Mowi has said the event was “a serious and very regrettable situation” and offered a NOK 500 (USD 44, EUR 43) bounty for each salmon caught by registered fishers and delivered to fish reception centers, The Guardian reported. In the unlikely event that all fish were caught, that would represent a NOK 13.5 million (USD 1.2 million, EUR 1.15 million) hit to Mowi, without considering any fines authorities may levy.
Environmental organizations have voiced their worries about the effect the escaped farmed salmon may have on Norway’s native wild North Atlantic salmon.
“27,000 farmed salmon on the run is a disaster for wild salmon,” Norske Lakseelver (Norwegian Salmon Rivers) spokesperson Pål Mugaas told The Guardian. “Science has proved that interbreeding between wild stocks and farmed salmon produce offspring that, in the long term, has a low survival rate in nature.”
The recent escape incident in Norway pales in comparison to the large-scale escape of 690,000 fish that took place at Mowi Chile’s Punta Redonda farming center in the southern Los Lagos Region in July 2018.
That led to Chile’s Superintendency of the Environment (SMA) hitting Mowi with a fine in August 2020 for having caused what it deemed as “irreparable environmental damage,” saying the farmer had failed to maintain “the appropriate security conditions and cultivation elements of optimal quality and resistance.”
At the time, SMA cited outdated water current measurements at the center, which was built in 2017, failure to implement recommended moorings, and evidence of wear and tear of the nets and mooring lines to which the company did not respond, which led to the escape when the center was subjected to extreme weather conditions.
Chile’s Third Environmental Court confirmed the sanction levied by SMA against Mowi Chile in February following an investigation into the event.
The fine reaches an equivalent of CLP 7.2 billion (USD 7.5 million, EUR 7.2 million) for two charges, one classified as very serious – failure to maintain appropriate safety conditions in the grow-out center – and the other as minor – having on-land support facilities not intended for the operation of a silage system in the treatment of salmon mortality.
Regarding the more serious charge, the court ruled that ...
