Algal bloom, island uproar put Chile's salmon industry on the hot seat.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
A "red tide" of unprecedented proportions has taken a heavy toll on parts of southern Chile, poisoning coastal waters and prompting a surge of popular frustration that resulted, last month, in a nearly three-week blockade of Chiloe, a large island off the Region de Los Lagos, approximately 1,000 kilometers south of Santiago.
Much of the anger is directed at the area's multibillion-dollar farmed salmon industry, the world's second largest after Norway. Salmon companies are a key source of employment in the Los Lagos and adjacent Los Rios and Aysen regions. But they also place tremendous stress on the environment and may have exacerbated the current crisis, some critics say, by dumping boatloads of rotting fish off the coast of Chiloe.
Red tide, so-named because of the discoloration it causes in water, is a colloquial term for a naturally occurring algal bloom that can have harmful, even deadly effects on fish, mollusks and other marine life. People who consume contaminated seafood can be sickened as well, which is why, starting in March, the government ordered a seafood moratorium in Chiloe that eventually included the entire island.
The measure had an immediate impact on residents there, many of whom depend one way or the other on seafood, not only as a source of income, but also as a cornerstone of their diet. "People don't dare eat our fish because they're afraid it is contaminated, so we are all affected on the island," Marcos Salas, leader of a fisher's union in Quellon, where the moratorium first went into effect, told freelance journalist Evelyn Pfeiffer last month. "We lost our labor source and now we have no way to bring sustenance to our families."
Residents in Quellon and elsewhere in southern Chile have dealt with algal blooms before, but never one that extended over such a large area, or produced the kinds of bizarre beachings of dead shellfish, anchovies, squid and even mammals that have taken place at different spots along the coast in recent months. "Chile has never seen such a peak in blooms, in terms of geographical extent, level of growth, and duration," the country's Colegio de Biologos Marinos, a marine scientists' guild, reported in early May.
Demanding a better deal
President Michelle Bachelet addressed the problem in late April, officially declaring the coast of the Region de Los Lagos a "catastrophe zone" and promising aid money for small-scale fishers and others directly impacted by the algal bloom. "I want to offer...
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