Chile’s Superintendency of the Environment (SMA) has announced it will begin sanctioning proceedings against Nova Austral for environmental damage the company caused at four salmon-farming sites in the Magallanes region of Chile.
SMA said it found evidence of overproduction, waste mishandling, inadequate mortality management, breaches in its silage platform allowing runoff, and not having mandatory equipment to comply with rules pertaining to algal blooms and fish escapes. The four sites where the SMA recorded violations are: Aracena 10, Aracena 19, Cockburn 14, and Cockburn 23, all located in the Alberto de Agostini National Park in Chile’s Magallanes Region, also known as Region XII.
In its official notice, the SMA also charged Nova Austral with failure to comply with a request for information, which it said was “the most serious” of the charges. According to the SMA, the company informed the agency it did not have daily log control records for its mortalities at the sites, “when there are circumstances in the investigation that provide for the opposite.”
“The Superintendency considers the breach of this requirement constitutes a deliberate concealment of information that prevents the work officially charged to the SMA, and that it may have as its objective the concealment or concealment of other regulatory breaches,” Sebastián Riestra, the head of SMA’s Sanctions and Compliance Division, said in a press release.
Nova Austral has faced scrutiny since June, when Chilean press outlet EL Mostrador published emails that purportedly revealed an attempt to manipulate the company’s reported mortality rates. In response, Sernapesca, the country’s fisheries and aquaculture service, filed three complaints against the company for knowingly misleading authorities through false reporting of information, and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council terminated a logo licensing agreement on all of Nova Austral’s products while it carries out its own independent investigation. The company itself fired CEO Nicos Nicolaides in July.
Nova Austral is “committed to a full and complete remediation of any potential issues identified during the pending investigation,” it said in a statement released in July.
Chile’s elected leaders have also responded to the Nova Austral scandal with proposed legislation that seeks to cut back the number of salmon farming concessions in the Magallanes region by 50 percent. A bill introduced by four Chilean senators aims to tighten national rules for the granting, extension and distribution of maritime concessions to the salmon industry, according to La Prensa Austral. Additionally, the bill calls for the shortening of 25-year renewable leases to 10-year leases.
Nova Austral Regional Manager Drago Covacic said the bill could eliminate the jobs of up to 600 employees working directly in the salmon industry in the region, plus thousands more working in auxiliary positions to the salmon sector.
In bringing additional charges against Nova Austral, Riestra said SMA was coordinating closely with Sernapesca, “together with giving a more timely and effective sanction response for these type of breaches, which they have a high environmental cost.”
“These type of findings not only consists in a manifest breach of our environmental qualification resolutions, but because the biological load capacity in a farming center is directly affected by the volume of production. The greater the volume, the greater the amount of feed that is supplied to the fish and greater the amount of feces that they produce, which entails an increase of nutrients in the water and consequently an increase of microorganisms that feed on these nutrients, the proliferation of algae, and definitively, the decrease in oxygen,” Riestra said.
Even though Nova Austral’s production accounts for just 3 percent of all salmon produced in Chile, the allegations surrounding the company’s misbehavior are troubling for the industry as a whole, according to Alejandro Buschmann, a biologist and a professor at Universidad de Los Lagos.
“What happened with Nova Austral is intolerable,” Buschmann told the Los Angeles Times. “This dishonest act casts a doubt over the whole salmon industry because there’s no evidence that the same thing hasn’t happened with other companies.”
Photo courtesy of Chile Superintendency of the Environment
