Chilean fishing and salmon-farming company Blumar announced that it will file legal action against the Chilean government over its newly enacted fishing law.
Chile’s Senate voted a new fishing quota bill into law in June to replace the nation’s previous fishing law, enacted in 2013 and originally set to last until 2032.
President Gabriel Boric said he considered the previous law to be “illegitimate and illegal” and sought to introduce legislation that would reduce quotas allocated to industrial fishing firms, increase artisanal quotas instead for species such as anchovies, Spanish sardines, horse mackerel, and common hake.
While the law was still being crafted, industrial fishing company Landes filed legal action against the Chilean government for “covert expropriation,” asserting that the technical, financial, and regulatory impact reports – required by current regulations to ensure the legality and constitutionality of any bill making its way through Chilean Congress – never took place during the fishing bill’s preparation.
“The new fisheries legislation promoted by the executive [branch] is a tombstone for a company like ours, which employs more than 600 people in Talcahuano, Biobío region, in a key area for the country’s development,” Landes CEO Andrés Fosk said at the time. “Even more serious, it affects the well-being of hundreds of families by pushing initiatives that violate the constitution and affect property rights that have been developed with more than 70 years of investments and business work.”
Then, as soon as the law passed Chile’s Lower House, fellow fishing firm Camanchaca announced it would resort to legal recourse, questioning not just the lower quotas for the industrial sector but also a newly introduced tariff on the purchase of international quotas. Camanchaca confirmed to SeafoodSource that its legal team is working on the case to present a lawsuit by the end of the year.
The government’s move has also been highly criticized by the Chilean National Fisheries Society (Sonapesca), which said it set a dangerous precedent and affected private investment by transferring 489,000 metric tons (MT) of marine resources – valued at USD 160 million (EUR 139.3 million) a year – from the industrial to the artisanal sector.
By taking legal action, Blumar now officially adds its name to the growing list of disgruntled industrial fishing stakeholders in Chile.
“Blumar made this decision after an exhaustive review to confirm that the quota law affects acquired rights, halts investments, and impacts the company's assets. All possible instances of dialogue were exhausted; now, these actions seek to protect shareholders and workers,” Pedro Pablo Gutiérrez, a lawyer representing Blumar in the suit, said.
Gutiérrez, a specialist in civil and commercial litigation and a partner at law firm Gutiérrez, Waugh, Jimeno & Asenjo (GWJA), will lead Blumar’s legal team.
The suit focuses on the assertion that the new law violates rights legitimately acquired by fishing companies in 2012 without establishing adequate compensation, therefore constituting regulatory expropriation.
“This represents a clear violation of legal security and property rights protected by the constitution,” GWJA partner Juan Francisco Asenjo said.
With the loss in quota, Blumar said it will need to halt USD 45 million (EUR 38.6 million) in investment it was going to use to build a plant in the coastal town of Coronel. The halted project would result in the loss of 250 direct and indirect jobs and pause production of at least 30,000 MT per year of high-quality seafood, Blumar said.
According to the company, it is estimated that about 2,500 direct jobs are at immediate risk in the processing-heavy Biobío region due to the reduction of industrial quotas, with a domino effect set to start falling on the entire regional production chain from 2026 onward.
“When the state unilaterally changes the rules of the game, without compensation and affecting investments already made, the basic principles of legal certainty that every serious country must guarantee are undermined,” Gutiérrez said.
Camanchaca CEO Ricardo García previously said that the double burden of reduced quotas and increased tariffs would significantly affect the dynamism of the regional fishing industry.
“The combination of both factors will inevitably slow down sector development, with a more severe impact on the Biobío region, which is the industrial heart of Chilean fishing. In the case of Camanchaca, it will mean a drop of more than 20 percent in the production of horse mackerel for human consumption, and that lower volume [contributes] directly to the loss of industrialization and regional employment,” he said.
