Landings of fish along Chile’s coast during the first five months of 2026 have fallen to their lowest level in a decade.
Catch totals corresponding to industrial and artisanal landings reached 817,000 metric tons (MT) between January and May of this year, marking a 41 percent drop compared to the 1.4 million MT reached in the same period of 2025, according to Chile’s latest sectoral report from the Undersecretariat of Fisheries and Aquaculture (Subpesca)
Horse mackerel catch totals took the biggest hit during the period, dropping 45 percent to 354,000 MT, compared to 646,000 MT in the same period of 2025. Common sardine landings fell 38 percent, and anchovy catch was down 31 percent.
“Pelagic fisheries are particularly sensitive to variations in sea surface temperature, the intensity of coastal upwelling, the availability of nutrients, and other oceanographic processes,” the Subpesca report said. “The cumulative decrease in landings in May, particularly in pelagic resources such as horse mackerel, anchovy, common sardine, and mackerel, constitutes a relevant signal that must be analyzed considering biological, environmental, productive, and operational factors in an integrated manner.”
Subpesca warned that the trend should not be associated with a single cause.
“The behavior of fish landings observed as of May 2026 must be interpreted in a particularly dynamic environmental context for the Chilean marine system,” it said, including thermal anomalies in the South Pacific and conditions that could be linked to El Niño.
The lower fishing landings were partially offset by positive performance within the aquaculture sector, which contributed 669,000 MT of production, up 6 percent compared to January through May of the previous year.
Considering both the fishing and aquaculture sectors, total landings reached 1.7 million MT as of May, down 24 percent compared to the same period in 2025, when they totaled 2.2 million MT.
According to the report, the country’s recorded low point in terms of wild-caught landings was hit in 2016 when 580,000 MT of fish were caught in the five-month period. The combined fishery and aquaculture total was also at its lowest in 2016, when landings of 1.3 million MT were recorded.
