Destroying Chile's salmon industry

What a sad, significant story: factory farming of salmon in Chile may be about to destroy that nation's salmon industry, its third-largest. From the Times:

A virus called infectious salmon anemia, or I.S.A., is killing millions of salmon destined for export to Japan, Europe and the United States. The spreading plague has sent shivers through Chile’s third-largest export industry, which has left local people embittered by laying off more than 1,000 workers.

It has also opened the companies to fresh charges from biologists and environmentalists who say that the breeding of salmon in crowded underwater pens is contaminating once-pristine waters and producing potentially unhealthy fish.

Some say the industry is raising its fish in ways that court disaster, and producers are coming under new pressure to change their methods to preserve southern Chile’s cobalt blue waters for tourists and other marine life.

“All these problems are related to an underlying lack of sanitary controls,” said Dr. Felipe C. Cabello, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at New York Medical College in Valhalla that has studied Chile’s fishing industry. “Parasitic infections, viral infections, fungal infections are all disseminated when the fish are stressed and the centers are too close together.”

You read on in the story, and you find that factory farming methods of salmon are destroying local marine ecosystems, which can't handle salmon living together in such high concentrations, and creating all that waste. And of course, there's this:

On a recent visit to the port of Castro, about 105 miles south of Puerto Montt, a warehouse contained hundreds of bags, some weighing as much as 2,750 pounds, filled with salmon food and medication.

The bags — many of which were labeled “Marine Harvest” [the Norwegian company farming the salmon -- RD] and “medicated food” for the fish — contained antibiotics and pigment as well as hormones to make the fish grow faster, said Adolfo Flores, the port director.

More:

Residual antibiotics have been detected in Chilean salmon that have been exported to the United States, Canada and Europe, Dr. Cabello said.

He estimated that 70 to 300 times more antibiotics are used by salmon producers in Chile to produce a ton of salmon than in Norway. But no hard data exist to corroborate the estimates, he said, “because there is almost an underground market of antibiotics in Chile for salmon aquaculture.”

Researchers say that some antibiotics that are not allowed in American aquaculture, like flumequine and oxolinic acid, are legal in Chile and may increase antibiotic resistance for people. Last June the United States Food and Drug Administration blocked the sale of five types of Chinese seafood because of the use of fluoroquinolones and other additives.

But huge numbers of fish go uninspected. The F.D.A. inspected only 1.93 percent of all imported seafood in 2006, Food and Water Watch said, citing F.D.A. data.

Twenty-nine percent of Chile's salmon production is exported to the United States. I would be careful about eating it if I were you. The thing is, the same basic problems afflicting Chile's factory-farmed salmon are present wherever there's factory farming. We jack animals up on hormones to make them grow faster, and mainline antibiotics to them to prevent them from getting sick from the unnatural, perverse methods of animal husbandry we employ. It's a disgusting process.