A polluted, "milk"-colored river near Pucon.
Photo courtesy of Bruce Wheeler

Controversial Salmon Farm Denied Permission To Expand

The stunning, tourism-friendly city of Pucón in southern Chile’s Region IX is just saying no – to fish farming.

Earlier this month Pucón’s mayor and city councilors voted unanimously in favor of a moratorium on new fish farm (aquaculture) operations. The decision marked a rare public stance against the lucrative industry, which overall generated some US$2.2 billion in earnings last year and is a major source of employment in southern Chile –reasons enough for local and national authorities to treat salmon and trout farming as more or less untouchable.

City leaders in Pucón, however, say they’ve had enough with the largely unregulated fish farms that are moving into the area, polluting its beautiful lakes and rivers.

“This decision was made because of the pollution that’s being generated by the indiscriminate installation of fish farms,” Carlos Inostroza, a Pucón City Hall communications officer, told the Patagonia Times. “We have approximately 20 farms, both small and large. And they cause a lot of people to complain to City Hall about the pollutants being pumped into the rivers.”

One of those people is Bruce Wheeler, a U.S. citizen who has lived in the area for the past 15 years. In 2000 a fish farm called Quimeyco set up operations next door to Wheeler’s property – approximately 20 kilometers outside of the city center. First the company cut down his fence, he recalls. It then brought in heavy machinery and proceeded to destroy an approximately 100-meter stretch of the riverbank. Since then things have gone from bad to worse, Wheeler said.

“In January, in the middle of the summer… they got a big tanker truck and were dumping all their waste in the river. Right in front of a camping place,” he said. “The water was white, the color of milk for, like, three kilometres.”

Wheeler and other area residents alerted authorities. Water inspectors came out. City Hall shut the fish farm down. Soon after, however, government environmental authorities overruled the municipal decision and reopened the Quimeyco farm. The company in turn filed a lawsuit against the city.

“It just goes on and on, it’s just like a soap opera,” said Wheeler. “This piscicultura (the Quimeyco fish farm), they must have 10 or 15 lawsuits against them, from other pisciculuras, from SAG (the Dept. of Agriculture and Livestock), from you name it they’ve got it.”

Zunilda Cevallo Colipe, a Mapuche woman living in the area, has also had first-hand experience with encroaching fish farms, one of which abuts her family’s land.

“Before, when I was little, we were raised with this water. The water crosses my land. My grandfather, my aunts and uncles, all my ancestors drank the water,” she told the Patagonia Times.

Nowadays she’s afraid to even use the water for irrigation purposes, let alone to prepare tea – as she remembers doing years ago. “As a farmer this hurts me…sometimes (the water) that comes through is green,” she said.

Cevallo and Wheeler agree that the recent Pucón municipal decision is a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, they’re quick to admit that it’s largely a symbolic gesture that the city has no real authority to enforce.

“They’re going to do everything in their power that they can, but like they say, the fish farms get their permission outside of Pucón, in Temuco, and they come in here and start working. No one even knows how many fish farms there are, there’s no idea. It could be 25. It could be 40,” said Wheeler.

Carlos Inostroza agrees. As a journalist and city official, he fields numerous citizen complaints regarding aquaculture pollution. Ultimately, though, “I can’t do anything because the government gives these companies permission,” he said. “This issue has to do with CONAMA (the National Environmental Committee). They’re the ones that hand out the permits.”

Still, the City Hall decision – symbolic or not – has not gone unnoticed. One group that immediately tuned into the move is the Pure Salmon Campaign, a Washington D.C.-based organization that seeks to protect the environment, consumers and local communities through improved fish-farming standards.

“We’re looking forward to what’s going on down there, because this is a new initiative. What’s completely new is a town deciding that they don’t want more aquaculture,” said Cristian Perez, the Campaign’s Chile representative.

It’s likely that the tough anti-aquaculture stance – together with first-hand lobbying by Pucón city officials – also influenced last week’s decision by CONAMA not to grant Quimeyco permission to expand its Pucón operations.

“That’s another positive sign for the city, since it’s putting up more and more obstacles in the way of the fish farms. They are destroying the environment upon which (Pucón), as a park city, as a city that sells itself to the world because of its natural beauty, relies,” said Inostroza.

By Benjamin Witte (benwitteATsantiagotimes.cl)