A Million Salmon Starve and Rot as Protests Block Chile Farms

(Bloomberg) -- A million salmon are starving or rotting in abandoned farms and processing plants in Chile, the world's second-largest producer of the fish, as protests prevent workers from accessing facilities.

The risk of environmental damage is imminent, with 800,000 fish waiting to be fed and harvested, and 320 tons decaying in processing plants, industry group SalmonChile said in a statement Monday. The situation is most critical in the town of Quellon on the southern island of Chiloe.

“The health risks will keep rising as the days go by and companies don't handle the rotting fish,” Scarlett Molt, the regional secretary for health-care in the Los Lagos region, told Radio BioBio. “They need to move away the product and handle it following the protocols.”

Chile, which produces about 25% of the world's supply of salmon, is enduring the worst social unrest since the end of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in 1990. The wave of protests over the rising cost of living has stretched the length of the country, bringing millions onto the streets and blocking roads and ports. More than a quarter of the supermarkets in the country have been ransacked.

Barricades on roads to salmon farms and processing plants have blocked access to the facilities for days, SalmonChile said. The industry group is asking local authorities to intervene to prevent the problem escalating.

The affected plants include facilities owned by Empresas AquaChile SA, Marine Farm and Salmones Austral SpA, Diario Financiero reported. Officials at the three companies didn't immediately reply to requests for comment.

Chile's fishing authority Sernapesca said six different facilities containing 890,000 fish are blocked and can't conduct harvesting. The fish don't pose a sanitary risk for now and authorities are doing everything possible to allow companies to transfer the stranded fish to other farms nearby.

Chile's salmon industry has a chequered past on environment issues. Algae blooms that environmentalists including Greenpeace have attributed in part to salmon farming have caused environmental disasters on the coasts of southern Chile. In 2016, a particularly big bloom killed millions of farmed fish and lead to heavy losses for salmon producers. Marine wildlife also suffered, with dead fish and shellfish washing up on the coast of the Chiloe island. Local fishermen that depend on that fish to survive rioted for days and blocked roads in protest.

To contact the reporter on this story: Laura Millan Lombrana in Santiago at lmillan4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Luzi Ann Javier at ljavier@bloomberg.net, Philip Sanders, James Attwood

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