Chile’s fishing industry is at the crossroads of development with this year seeing a new law passed that is aimed at helping the country maintain its position as one of the world’s leading fishing nations. Adrian Tatum reports.
There can’t be a fishing industry around the world that hasn’t been through tough times. Most have suffered at the hand of faltering economies or from factors such as overfishing. Chile, with its 6,435km coastline is, of course, no exception.
The Humboldt Current that surrounds Chilean waters means the Chilean Sea is considered among the most produvtive marine ecosystems in the world. Artisan fishing is a significant part of the country’s tradition and still involves old pre-Hispanic traditions as well as modern, industrial techniques. The country was one of the first to develop aquaculture, with the introduction of salmon.
Fisheries Act
Fast forward to 2013 and times are changing. The beginning of the year saw a victory for the domestic fishing sector with the passing of a new Fisheries Act that now reserves the first mile of coastal waters for vessels less than 12 metres long. This protects the domestic fleet from larger foreign vessels and other industrial vessels.
Seven of Chile’s maritime unions joined forces to mobilise workers during the Act’s renewal. Throughout the latter half of 2012, demonstrations, occupations and strikes across Chile’s main ports, ensured that the needs of fishers and fisheries workers were high on the agenda.
The renewed Act was intended to extend regulation and sustainability within the Chilean fishing industry, worth more than US$1.2bn annually. The past 10 years have seen a severe depletion in Chile’s fish stocks due to overfishing.
Two years ago saw a drastic reduction in fishing capture quotas. Chile’s Minister of Economy, Juan Andres Fontaine said that according to sound scientific surveys, most Chilean fisheries were over exploited. The current over exploitation of the main Chilean fisheries is most worrisome and in some cases the situation has become critical, said Mr Fontaine at the time.
This was the case for Chile’s main capture species, jurel (Inca scad or Chilean jack mackerel) but also included skates, golden king clip, hoki and anchovy.
Mr Fontaine said that past fishing policies were mostly to blame for the situation and are threatening the long term sustainability of the resource by allowing catches greater than the biological optimum. This in other words meant global catch quotas larger that those scientifically recommended.
The activities of foreign vessels operating outside Chile’s exclusive economic zone (200 miles) were also to blame, having strongly eroded migratory straddling species such as the Inca scad.
A 2012 WWF report found that many examples of exploiting fisheries that have prevailed in the last decade had driven fish stocks to critically low levels in Chile.
A report by the Marine Conservation Programme of the Chilean chapter of the World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF-Chile) indicated that 64% of the 22 fisheries in the country that have catch quotas are biologically overexploited, a figure that is in line with official statistics.
The report said that, out of 148 fishery resources landed in 2009, only 20 have been assessed for their biological condition or exploitation status. Therefore nothing is known about the status of 86% of national fishery resources, representing 30% of the total catch.
In Chile, 92% of extracted marine resources are fish, 5% are algae or kelp, and the remaining 3% are shellfish. Extractive fishing contributed 0.4% of GDP in 2011 and exports of farmed and wild fish earned over 4.88 billion dollars that year.
The exploitation of these stocks and the measures taken to protect them, have meant artisanal fishers have found their livelihoods threatened and in decline. Their union activities have enabled them to achieve some security despite the changing industry.
But the Act has also been seen as controversial. Despite the protection inside, the law paved the way for individually transferable quotas by allowing companies to swap and trade quotas. It also abolished perpetual licenses, and increased regulation on larger artisanal vessels.
Jack mackerel
In 2011, unemployment in Chile’s fishing industry increased due to the reduction in catch quotas adopted in response to overfishing and plunging stocks of key species, particularly jack mackerel, the main commercial species of fish caught in Chile.
Jack mackerel is primarily used in Chile to produce fishmeal and fish oil, although it is also exported canned or frozen.
The National Fisheries Council, made up of authorities and representatives of the fishing industry, set the 2010 quota at 1.3 million tonnes of jack mackerel. But by November that year, just 450,000 tonnes had been caught, according to the Fisheries Under-Secretariat at the Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism.
While fish freezing and canning plants in south-central Chile were active 100 days a year on average in previous years, only 45 days of activity went ahead in 2011. The jack mackerel industry, including the fishing fleet and processing plants, generates more than 10,000 direct jobs.
The National Fisheries Council approved a quota of 48,000 tonnes of South Pacific hake for 2011 a 13% cut from 2010.
In addition, the 2011 quota for southern hake was set for 24,000 tonnes, 8% down from the 2010 limit; the quota for Patagonian grenadier was 123,000 tonnes, a 20% cut; the quota for the pink cusk-eel was 2,900 tonnes, a 22% reduction; and the combined quota for Peruvian anchovy and common sardine was 650,000 tonnes.
All this has been addressed in the new fisheries law, but it has also attracted strong criticism this year from the artisanal fisheries, which said it favoured the commercial sector.
However, Subpesca, Chile’s fisheries secretariat, said the new law increased the share for artisanal fisheries to 55% of total catches, up from 52%.
Chile’s artisanal fishery is composed of some 13,000 boats, of up to 18 metres in length.
The new law increased regulation on the larger artisanal vessels, which, although they only account for a tenth of the fleet, catch 90% of the artisanal quota.
Explaining the law at this years European Seafood Exposition, held in Brussels, Chile’s Vice Minister of Fishing, Pablo Galilea, said Chile has plans to maintain its position as a world power in fisheries and aquaculture, and believes that his country’s new fisheries law is just the tool to help Chile achieve this goal (see World Fishing & Aquaculture June 2013).
He said the primary objective of the new fisheries law is to ensure the sustainability of the fisheries resource. Under the new law a number of measures will be taken to achieve this, including introducing sustainable management standards such as Biological Reference Points (BRP) and Maximum Sustainable Yield. New definitions to assess fishery resources will now be classified as incipient, under full exploitation, overexploited, and collapsed, and under the new law it is mandatory for an Annual Public Account to be made so that the status of fish stocks is available to everyone.
Plans are in place to establish Technical Scientific Committees (eight for fisheries and three for aquaculture), and measures to protect Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems have also be taken, including the prevention of bottom fishing in these areas until it is proven that it does not cause damage to the areas that are rich in coral, fish and hydrothermal vents.
Aquaculture
Chilean fisheries and aquaculture have grown impressively in the last 30 years, resulting in strong production and international positioning. A key industry player is aquaculture, whose 2010 sales stood at an impressive 78% of exports and 64% of the volume.
In 2010, aquaculture product exports for direct human consumption were led by rainbow trout, Atlantic and Pacific salmon, and mussels. Commercial fisheries exports were led by jack mackerel, southern hake, and Chilean sea bass.
A recent report from Rabobank that says that the future remains bright for the Chilean salmon industry. Although Chilean Atlantic salmon production is expected to increase by more than 20% in 2013, says the report, growth will be substantially below initial estimates due to increasing challenges on the production, sanitary and financial fronts.
According to the report, growth in Chilean salmon output is also expected to stall between 2014 and 2016. But despite this slowdown, Rabobank has an optimistic view of the Chilean salmon industry and its ability to create lasting growth. Chile has all the prospects of being one of the best places in the world to produce salmon over the long term, said Valeria Mutis, Rabobank analyst.
The report says that Chile’s potential for expansion is greater than any other region in the world. Its natural markets, the America’s and possibly Asia, are where most demand growth will occur. It also said that regulation of the Chilean salmon industry requires further improvement. Globally, in 2013, Rabobank expects Atlantic salmon production to expand only slightly, between 1% and 2%, as supply from Norway is expected to contract by 2% to 3%.
Working towards a sustainable future
Chilean common hake is one of the main seafood landings in Chile, and a major export product. In 2012, exports were worth $US128m, more than a third of which was destined for the US market. Germany and Italy together made up another third of the market, according to the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership.
In the US, Chilean hake is a particular favourite of large retailers such as Wallmart. From June 2012, Walmart US has required all wild seafood supplies to become third-party certified as sustainable to the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) standard or equivalent, and uncertified fisheries to be actively working toward certification through Fisheries Improvement Projects (FIPs).
To help achieve this, Walmart has been working with the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP) to identify high-risk fisheries and to initiate FIPs, and Chilean hake was put forward as a suitable candidate for improvement.
The Chilean hake fishery is worked by around 1,500 artisan fishermen using longlines and gill nets, and also by the industrial bottom trawling sector, which has 60% of the TAC.
The fishery had been put through MSC pre-assessment in 2009, and this process identified a number of challenges to achieving full certification, including the need to set a TAC in line with scientific recommendations, and the necessity of gaining a better understanding of the interaction between the giant squid and common hake populations. It entered full assessment in 2010, confident that these could be overcome.
A stock assessment carried out at the end of 2012, taking peer review recommendations into consideration, found that the reproductive biomass had not recovered since 2009 and the stock’s age structure remained unstable, although this seemed not to have impaired recruitment.
The approved TAC for 2013 was set at 40,000 tonnes, 11% less than in 2012 and 20% less than in 2010, but IFOP recommended that it should be set at 26,000 tonnes in order to have a reasonable certainty of the stock recovering. This means that the current TAC is still higher than the scientific recommendation, and this is affecting progress towards MSC certification. It is therefore likely that this process will be suspended until progress on stock recovery gets back on track, says the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership.
It is now clear that further TAC cuts will be needed to help the fishery recover, and FIP stakeholders are currently in discussions with the government over details of a potential subsidy scheme that will help smaller fishermen and processors to offset the resulting losses they will incur.
Mercator Media Ltd 2013