Source: The New York Times [edited]
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/world/americas/27salmon.html>

Virus kills Chile’s salmon and indicts its fish farming methods

Looking out over the low green mountains jutting through miles of
placid waterways here [Puerto Montt] in southern Chile, it is hard to
imagine that anything could be amiss. But beneath the rows of neatly
laid netting around the fish farms just off the shore, the salmon are dying.A virus called infectious salmon anemia, or ISA, is killing millions
of salmon destined for export to Japan, Europe, and the United
States. The spreading plague has sent shivers through Chile’s
3rd-largest export industry, which has left local people embittered
by laying off more than 1000 workers.

It has also opened the companies to fresh charges from biologists and
environmentalists who say that the breeding of salmon in crowded
underwater pens is contaminating once-pristine waters and producing
potentially unhealthy fish.

Some say the industry is raising its fish in ways that court
disaster, and producers are coming under new pressure to change their
methods to preserve southern Chile’s cobalt blue waters for tourists
and other marine life.

“All these problems are related to an underlying lack of sanitary
controls,” said Dr Felipe C Cabello, a professor in the Department of
Microbiology and Immunology at New York Medical College in Valhalla
that has studied Chile’s fishing industry. “Parasitic infections,
viral infections, fungal infections are all disseminated when the
fish are stressed and the centers are too close together.”

Industry executives acknowledge some of the problems, but they reject
the notion that their practices are unsafe for consumers. American
officials also say the new virus is not harmful to humans.

But the latest outbreak has occurred after a rash of nonviral
illnesses in recent years that the companies acknowledge have led
them to use high levels of antibiotics. Researchers say the practice
is widespread in the Chilean industry, which is a mix of
international and Chilean producers. Some of those antibiotics, they
say, are prohibited for use on animals in the United States.

Many of those salmon still end up in American grocery stores, where
about 29 percent of Chilean exports are destined. While fish from
China have come under special scrutiny in recent months, in Chile
regulators have yet to form a registry that even tracks the use of
the drugs, researchers said.

The article highlights the growing disparity between the need for
food, the need for industries to grow and produce for their country’s
needs, as well as for export. It also highlights the growing
disparity between what is considered harmful. Perhaps there is not
enough information to know if ISA is harmful to humans. However, it
has been determined by the US FDA as well as by the European Union
that the antibiotics used to combat diseases in captive raised fish
has, in many cases, been banned.

The new virus is spreading, but it has primarily affected the fish of
Marine Harvest, a Norwegian company that is the world’s biggest
producer of farm-raised salmon and exports about 20 percent of the
salmon that come from Chile.

Salmon produced in Chile by Marine Harvest are sold in Costco and
Safeway stores, among other major grocery retailers, said Torben
Petersen, the managing director of Marine Harvest [in Chile].

Arne Hjeltnes, the main spokesman in Oslo for Marine Harvest, said
that his company recognized that antibiotic use was too high in Chile
and that fish pens too close together had contributed to the
problems. He said Marine Harvest welcomed tougher environmental regulations.

“Some people have advocated that this industry is too good to be
true,” Mr Hjeltnes said. “But as long as everybody has been making
lots of money and it has been going very well, there has been no
reason to take tough measures.”

He called the current crisis “eye-opening” to the different measures
that are needed.

On a recent visit to the port of Castro, about 105 miles (169 km)
south of Puerto Montt, a warehouse contained hundreds of bags, some
weighing as much as 2750 pounds (1247 kg), filled with salmon food
and medication. The bags — many of which were labeled “Marine
Harvest” and “medicated food” for the fish — contained antibiotics
and pigment as well as hormones to make the fish grow faster, said
Adolfo Flores, the port director.

Environmentalists say the salmon are being farmed for export at the
expense of almost everything else around. The equivalent of 7 to 11
pounds (3-5 kg) of fresh fish are required to produce 2 pounds (0.9
kg) of farmed salmon, according to estimates.

Salmon feces and food pellets are stripping the water of oxygen,
killing other marine life, and spreading disease, biologists and
environmentalists say. Escaped salmon are eating other fish species
and have begun invading rivers and lakes as far away as neighboring
Argentina, researchers say.

“It is simply not possible to produce fish on an industrial scale in
a sustainable way,” said Wolfram Heise, director of the marine
conservation program at the Pumalin Project, a private conservation
initiative in Chile. “You will never get it into ecological balance.”
When companies began breeding non-native Atlantic salmon [in Puerto
Montt] some 2 decades ago, salmon farming was seen as a godsend for
this sparsely populated area of sleepy fishing towns and campgrounds.

The industry has grown eightfold since 1990. Today it employs 53 000
people either directly or indirectly. Marine Harvest runs the world’s
largest “closed system” fish-farming operation at Rio Blanco, near
Puerto Montt, where 35 million fish a year are raised until they
weigh about a third of an ounce.

As the industry abandons the Lakes region in search of uncontaminated
waters elsewhere, local residents are angry and worried about their future.

The salmon companies “are robbing us of our wealth,” said Victor
Gutierrez, a fisherman from Cochamo, a town ringing the Gulf of
Reloncavi, which is dotted with salmon farms. “They bring illnesses
and then leave us with the problems.”

Since discovering the virus in Chile last July [2007], Marine Harvest
has closed 14 of its 60 centers and announced it would lay off 1200
workers, or one-quarter of its Chilean operation. Since the company
announced last month [February 2008] that it would move south, to
Aysen, the government has said the virus has spread there as well, in
2 outbreaks not involving Marine Harvest.

Industry officials say Chile is suffering growing pains similar to
salmon farming operations in Norway, Scotland, and the Faroe Islands,
where a different form of the ISA virus struck previously.

Norway, the world’s leading salmon producer, eventually decided to
spread salmon farms farther apart, reducing stress on the fish, and
responded to criticism of high antibiotic use with stronger
regulations and the development of vaccines.

Researchers in Chile say the problems of salmon farming go well
beyond the latest virus. Their concerns mirror those of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, which
heavily criticized Chile’s farm-fishing industry in a 2005 report.

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)
said the industry needed to limit the escapes of about one million
salmon a year; control the use of fungicides like green malachite, a
carcinogen that was prohibited in 2002; and better regulate the
colorant used to make salmon more rosy, which has been associated
with retina problems in humans. It also said Chile’s use of
antibiotics was “excessive.”

Officials at Sernapesca, Chile’s national fish agency, declined
repeated requests for interviews for this article and did not respond
to written questions submitted more than a week ago.

But Cesar Barros, the president of SalmonChile, an industry
association, said, “We are working with the government to improve the
situation.”

He dismissed the broader criticism of sanitary conditions, saying
there was no scientific evidence to support the claims. But
researchers charge that the industry has been reluctant to pay for
scientific studies, which Chile sorely needs.

Residual antibiotics have been detected in Chilean salmon that have
been exported to the United States, Canada, and Europe, Dr Cabello said.

He estimated that 70 to 300 times more antibiotics are used by salmon
producers in Chile to produce a ton of salmon than in Norway. But no
hard data exist to corroborate the estimates, he said, “because there
is almost an underground market of antibiotics in Chile for salmon
aquaculture.”

Researchers say that some antibiotics that are not allowed in
American aquaculture, like flumequine and oxolinic acid, are legal in
Chile and may increase antibiotic resistance for people. Last June
[2007] the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) blocked
the sale of 5 types of Chinese seafood because of the use of
fluoroquinolones and other additives.

But huge numbers of fish go uninspected. The FDA inspected only 1.93
percent of all imported seafood in 2006, Food and Water Watch said,
citing FDA data.

Stephanie Kwisnek, a spokeswoman for the FDA, said that she did not
know the percentage inspected. But she said the FDA tested 40 samples
of the 114 320 net tons of salmon imported from Chile in 2007. None
of them tested positive for malachite green, oxolinic acid,
flumequine, ivermectin, fluoroquinolones, or drug residues, she said.

The FDA is planning an inspection trip to assess Chile’s overall
controls on its farmed salmon, she added. Mr Petersen, the managing
director of Marine Harvest in Chile, said the company planned to
return to the Lakes region in a few years, once the area had become
free of contamination. In the longer term, he said, Marine Harvest
will leave Chile’s fresh-water lakes and produce more, older salmon
in closed systems where it can maintain “biological control.”

Meanwhile, neighboring fishermen who have been affected by the
fish-farming industry can only hope for better days. Mr Gutierrez,
33, said that just 6 years ago he and his fishing partner would haul
in 1100 pounds (500 kg) of robalo [common snook] on a typical day. On
a recent day he pointed to that morning’s catch of only 88 pounds (40
kg) in a cooler in the bed of a pickup truck.

He lamented the changes he had observed in the fish: they are rosier
than before, and their skin is flabbier. He said he suspected that
the wild fish were eating the same food pellets that the salmon were
being fed, which he said were falling to the sea floor.

“If the water continues to be contaminated, we will simply have to go
to another area to find our fish,” he said. “But it is getting harder
and harder.”

[Byline: Alexei Barrionuevo, with contribution by Pascale Bonnefoy]