Chile's farmed salmon production could drop by almost 25 percent because of stricter regulations aimed at tackling environmental crises that have decimated fish stocks in recent years.
It has been well documented on SeafoodSource that earlier this year a large algal bloom wiped out up to 20 percent of Chilean salmon, costing millions of dollars and cutting this year’s production to a forecasted level of around 650,000 metric tons (MT) – a 24 percent drop from the average annual output of the past four years.
Reuters has reported that Raul Sunico, head of the Chilean government's fishing and aquaculture body Subpesca, said that this level of output represents the low end of what the government expects to be a new reduced permanent range for production resulting from incoming rules aimed at reducing fish densities in pens by 27 percent.
But according to Reuters, some companies argue that the reduced density rules will raise the regulatory burden on salmon farms and could wind up hurting the industry's competitiveness without solving its most pressing sanitary issues, with the Chilean unit of Marine Harvest saying the industry instead needs predictable, sustainable regulations and that simply addressing fish densities is not enough to make the industry more sustainable.
Marine Harvest wants a stricter mandate to cap Chile's overall salmon production at 400,000 MT per year, matching environmental group Oceana's suggested limit.
Meanwhile, industry group SalmonChile wants the government to allow larger production areas, more flexibility to move pens around those areas, and increased spacing.
