UNU monitor
Instituto de Estudios Urbanos y Territoriales, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, El Comendador 1916, Providencia, Santiago de Chile, Chile
Department of Geography, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history:
Received 14 November 2008
Received in revised form 4 March 2010
Accepted 1 April 2010
Through the case of the salmon aquaculture sector in Chile, the risks involved in the development of a
non-traditional export sector are reviewed, in order to point to failings (lessons not learned) and
opportunities (lessons learned, new plans), and the changing scales of stakeholder interactions. In
particular the paper highlights the ways in which sustainability considerations have gained ground in
terms of evaluating sectoral development and what is expected from this development. These
considerations have emerged as a result of the increasing globalisation of the sector, through investment,
exports and international attention from an increasingly diverse set of stakeholders. These
sustainability considerations have generated a range of conflicts linked to these diverse actors. The
actors are local, national and global, operating through alliances to bring pressure on others. The conflicts
relate to environmental quality, foreign direct investment (FDI), local socio-economic development,
regional development, national economic strategies, and new globalised issues relating to the
production and consumption of foodstuffs. The contemporary panorama in the sector is significantly
different from the early origins in the 1980s under the dictatorship the period of the socio-ecological
silence also different from the 1990s period of economic expansion the economic imperative. Over
the past twenty-five years, the Chilean aquaculture sector has evolved from experimental production to
a major global industry. Regulatory frameworks and civil society awareness and mobilisation have
struggled to catch up with the dynamism of the sector, however the gap has reduced and the future of
the sector within the contemporary context of glocal sustainability is now under the microscope: the
sustainable globalisation perspective. The collapse of the sector during the period 20082010 as a
consequence of the ISA virus is a key moment with production severely diminished. The way out of the
crisis, via new legislation and inspection regimes, will create a new structure of aquaculture governance.
Nevertheless, the crisis marks a turning point in the industry, revealing the weaknesses built into the
former productive system.
2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Salmon
Aquaculture
Chile
Political ecology
Globalisation
Sustainability
1
This paper is based on research supported by the Norwegian Research Council:
The Spatial Embeddedness of Foreign Direct Investment (http://fdi.uib.no/
index.htm).
0959-3780/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.04.001
740
741
742
[(Fig._1)TD$IG]
Fig. 1. Global and Chilean salmon production (Source: SalmonChile, 2007; Revista
Aqua, 2007).
[(Fig._2)TD$IG]
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744
aspirations that are different from those of the early 1980s under
dictatorship and impoverishment. It is a landscape in which the
principal actors of the 1980s firms, state and workers are now
accompanied by a broader range of interests and resources both in
support of the sector, and critical of it.
The Region de los Lagos has been the principal recipient region
of aquaculture investment and production in Chile. However, the
lack of suitable sites has given rise to growth in the Region de
Aysen and the Region de Magallanes further south, despite their
geographical disadvantages. These disadvantages relate to the
need to access production units from the sea due to poor terrestrial
infrastructure, and the consequent logistical problems in getting
fish to processing plants for freezing, or fresh fish to Puerto Montt
or Punta Arenas airports and then on to their destinations. The
Region de los Lagos has been the region most transformed by the
sector to date however. This can be seen in economic data and in
terms of the urbanisation of the city of Puerto Montt where much
of the activity is headquarted or supplied from; Puerto Montt is the
city that experienced the highest urbanisation rate during the
inter-censal period 19922002.
While the role of salmon aquaculture in this regional
regeneration is unquestionable, the debate of the sustainability
of this new economic dependence is what has given rise to the
claims and counter-claims associated with sectoral conflicts which
have also changed in substance over the years (see Fig. 3). The
region has experienced boom and bust cycles previously relating
to capture fisheries and forestry during the 1970s. Promoted by the
dictatorship, these sectors were designed to regenerate the region
but both were unsuccessful, such as the Japanese Golden Spring
forestry project in Chiloe, and the expansion of artisanal fisheries
capacity in the area (Schurman, 1996). The ways in which these
lessons from the past have been learned and incorporated into
current management of the salmon aquaculture boom are unclear
however (see Buschmann, 2002).
The risk over the sector collapsing at some point was evident
from experiences in other locations, e.g. the Norwegian sector
collapse in the early 1990s (Holm and Jentoft, 1996), and the
disease outbreak in Scotland in the late 1990s that brought the
sector close to the brink. This uncertainty in home countries has
also been a trigger for increased foreign investment in Chile where
low disease rates, available sites and weak regulation initially
provided incentives for TNCs (Foreign Investment Committee,
2006, 2007; Flysand et al., 2005; Phyne et al., 2006). To avoid a
bust scenario, particularly with regards to disease outbreaks and
high mortalities, a strict regulatory regime was required. This
regime was slow to be implemented although it was created in the
fisheries and aquaculture legislation which dates from 1991 and
was strengthened in environmental terms through the Environmental Impact Assessment System operating from 1997, and the
later regulations on environmental controls (RAMA) and sanitary
controls (RESA) in aquaculture from 2001. Rather than the
legislation and regulations in and of themselves, it is specifically
the framework of regulatory monitoring and assessment that was
persistently weak. This is a hang-over from the decade of the
economic imperative when the regulatory apparatus was weak
and lacked power relative to the dynamism of this sector and its
role in national economic recovery; the risks involved have come
to the fore in the infectious salmon anaemia (ISA) virus outbreak
and the related crisis in the sector and in the areas where
production and processing is concentrated.
5. From local opposition to global alliances
What is clear during the 19822010 period is the way in which
the dynamism of the aquaculture sector has given rise to its
globalisation in terms of investment and exports, as well as a
[(Fig._3)TD$IG]
745
[(Fig._4)TD$IG]
746
[(Fig._5)TD$IG]
[(Fig._6)TD$IG]
747
[(Image_1)TD$FG]
[(Image_2)TD$FG]
748
[(Image_3)TD$FG] Image 2. From the Sin Miedo contra La Corriente campaign of Oxfam-Terram.
749
[(Fig._7)TD$IG]
750
2
Ministry of Agricultural and Farm Development, cited in VietFish http://
www.vietfish.com/index.php/news/detail/1476/isa_virus_in_chilian_salmon_and_vietnamese_salmon_import.
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