A joint project between prominent aquaculture producers and suppliers in Chile has moved into its second phase, with an ambitious goal to slash antibiotic use in the country’s seafood farming sector. Participants of the Pincoy Project say the search for an effective formula to achieve this goal continues past its two-year pilot phase.
Announced in 2016, the Pincoy Project is a joint endeavor that includes companies such as Skrettig, AquaGen/Blue Genomics, Centrovet, Pharmaq, Cermaq, Blumar, and Ventisqueros.
The project started with a two-year pilot program that culminated at the end of 2018. Now participants are taking results and expanding the scope of the project and its visibility among the greater aquaculture industry in Chile.
The project aims to develop a holistic approach to aquaculture that will allow Chile’s industry at large to rely less on antibiotics.
At Chile’s Aquasur 2018 event held in Puerto Montt last October, the project received an award for its environmental contribution.
"The project delivers a collaborative and holistic approach to combat the use of antibiotics, through an initiative that defines high standards of animal welfare and operational excellence throughout the value chain,” Ronald Barlow, general manager of Skretting Chile, said at the time.
The biggest challenge for salmon producers in Chile is Salmonid rickettsial syndrome (SRS), which – according to a Pincoy Project statement – has been the leading driver of intensive antibiotic use in the Chilean salmon industry in recent years, as standard vaccines and therapies proved to be only partially effective.
Chile’s fisheries and aquaculture authority Sernapesca found that in 2018, SRS accounted for 67.9 percent of the overall infectious mortality in Chile.
The first phase of the Pincoy Project has moved along at a good pace, but the long productive cycle of salmon means that it takes several months to see results for each phase, said Julio Mendoza, technical director for Cermaq Chile, when interviewed in February 2019. Currently, he said that the participant companies, through different committees, have been able to adhere to the common objectives and strengthen the work system they have organized.
Mendoza told SeafoodSource that while the objective or reducing antibiotics is ambitious, it is achievable. Over the course of the pilot program, the company has “experiences of all kind, which is positive, as the most relevant is to find a model or formula that allows our objectives.”
This is a complex process because the diseases that the antibiotics address are “multifaceted” and the path to reducing reliance has not been a simple one.
One of the challenges has been to properly use the information generated from the first phase, “and reach conclusions regarding the comparison of productive information and their results. This is particularly true because the same actions could see different results in different farm sites or different companies.
Regarding costs associated with salmon production in the pilot, WHOO said that there is only a marginal difference between their results and its conventional production.
These differences between companies and productive centers emphasize a need for flexibility, which Mendoza said is even more important than applying ridged regulatory parameters. Rather, salmon farmers need to find different strategies for each case. It also requires a change in approach – for example, “not [using] antibiotics by obligation or prematurely as there are other tools that will help the fish to confront disease.”
The upcoming phase includes an expansion in the scope of the project and its visibility. This includes a new website, a manual of best practices for the industry that includes conclusions, and feedback from results of the pilot. This is in addition to the collaborative work in five committees that address different aspects and sectors of the aquaculture industry.
The project comes just as Chile’s salmon industry has set aggressive goals regarding antibiotic reductions, promising to cut use by 50 percent by 2025. At the Seafood Expo North America in March, companies representing about 80 percent of the total production of salmon in Chile vowed to reduce their use of antibiotics and seek a “Good Alternative” rating from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program by 2025.
