Chile’s Fish Tale Has a Happy Ending

With a flick of the wrist, Alejandro Perelman tosses a scoopful of fish meal into a cage holding 7,000 hungry salmon.

The cool, Pacific water suddenly boils in a feeding frenzy of silvery fish, each one bulging with meat that in a few days will join the 120,000 tons of salmon that Chile will export onto the world market this year.

With ideal water and climate, low costs and booming demand, Chile’s salmon-farming industry has exploded in 10 years to become the world’s second largest, passing Canada and Britain and behind only the industry’s undisputed king, Norway.

Leading a trend toward mass fish farming, Chile is helping transform salmon from a high-class specialty to something like pink hamburger--literally. Frozen “salmon burgers” are on sale in Chilean supermarkets.

“They say salmon will be the chicken of the year 2000,” said Perelman, production manager at salmon producer Invertec Pesquera Mar de Chiloe SA in the seaside town of Chonchi.

“The big fleets are annihilating what’s left of fish stocks in the oceans, so the future is in raising fish like salmon. It’s what people are going to be eating in the future,” he said.

Once shunned by connoisseurs accustomed to the wild stuff, farmed salmon accounted for no more than 2% of world consumption in the early 1980s.

That figure soared to about 40% by 1994 with millions of new salmon consumers, said Rodrigo Infante, general manager of the Chilean Salmon and Trout Producers Assn.

“We put the fish in a cage, we feed it, and then we harvest it. It’s like livestock except that it’s in the ocean, and that’s a completely new concept,” he said.

He compared the advent of big-scale fish farming to the domestication of livestock. “Thousands of years ago people started raising cows. That’s what’s happening here except it’s fish,” he said.

Chile produced 97,000 tons of farmed salmon last year worth $490 million, up from $350 million in 1994 and virtually nil 10 years before that.

With no native salmon, investors imported stock from Europe, Japan and North America in the early 1980s and set up floating farms with seed money from a private technology transfer corporation, Fundacion Chile.

Thousands of floating salmon cages now dot the bays and fiords of southern Chile, especially on the island of Chiloe where they have become the bane of tourists and campers used to the island’s pristine scenery.

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The fish are raised in a life cycle that follows every step in the wild, starting with a hatchery where giant steel tanks hold 50,000 newborn minnows each.

Everything is an artificial version of the natural state--the current in the hatchery tanks flowing at the speed of a tranquil mountain brook, nets over the tanks acting like a forest tree cover.

“We found that if you don’t give them shade, the sun burns their fins and makes it harder for them to swim,” said Adan Alvarado, hatchery technician at the Mares Australes SA plant on Lake Llanquihue that churns out 6 million smolts a year.

Taken out of the tanks, the fish mature for 4 months in cages in freshwater lakes. Then trucks take them to ocean cages, where they are fattened up with food carrying a natural pigment to give them the pinkish hue that consumers like.

Wild salmon get the color from crustaceans they eat, but farmed fish would be pale without the pigment.

After about a year, the fish are killed and taken to one of about 15 major packing plants where an assembly line can gut, filet and pack them off to Japan and the United States at a rate of 50 tons a day.

The whole process--from the day they hatch to the day they reach the consumer’s table--takes no more than 1 1/2 years for fresh salmon, a little longer for frozen fish.

Production at Perelman’s company reflects the industry’s breakneck growth--1,600 tons of marketable salmon and trout in the 1994-95 summer season, 2,500 tons this season, and a projected 9,000 tons by 1999.

The industry has been growing so fast that producers have trouble keeping track of new companies jumping in, while bigger companies are busily buying up the minnows.

“With an industry that’s growing as quickly as this, competition is a relative term,” said Pablo Aguilera, general manager of Salmopack in the regional capital of Puerto Montt. “The main competition isn’t for prices or materials, but for qualified labor.”

The ecological impact has also caused concern. Although there are few studies on the issue, environmentalists say salmon droppings and uneaten food promote algae growth that inhibits native life forms from developing.

Salmon companies say the impact is minor and that they need clean water to produce the fish--more than enough incentive to keep it unpolluted.

Less clear is the impact of escaped salmon on native fish species.

Fishermen say they often haul in 6-foot salmon in their nets and accuse them of gobbling up other species. Escaped salmon are completely acclimated into the local ecosystem, living and reproducing in Chilean streams and bays just like their cousins in the U.S. Northwest.