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Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Jane Chambers. Today we're in the South American country of Chile to find out about its second largest export, salmon. The fish is widely considered to be a superfood, which is popular in places like the United States, Europe and Japan. Salmon is a superfood.
Salmon is an excellent choice of food. It's a protein which is healthy and nutritious. It's versatile, which means you can have it as a main protein in your dinner or enjoy with friends at a brunch. That's Francisco Lobos, a passionate advocate for salmon, and the chief corporate officer at Multiex, a salmon export company.
In 2023, the global Atlantic salmon market was valued at approximately $19 billion. Norway is currently the world's biggest producer of farmed salmon, with around 45% of the total market share, followed by Chile, which has about 35%.
According to a recent report from seafood market analysis Contali, the global salmon farming industry is projected to grow 40% by 2033. Today we'll be finding out why the market's so important to Chile, some of the challenges it faces and how it's adapting. That's all coming up in Business Daily.
My first stop is Multi-X's processing plant in the port city of Puerto Montt, 11 hours drive down south from Chile's capital, Santiago. Very strict cleanliness policy. I've just had to wash my hands. I'm in a white suit and I'm currently wading through some water to clean my boots.
Oh there's an overwhelming smell of fish. Very very busy production centre with lots of people in white suits and when I look down below I can just see conveyors of people with fillets of salmon getting them ready.
Hello, my name is Armando Baden and I am the assistant manager at the fresh and frozen salmon processing plant at Multi-X, which is one of the biggest salmon companies in Chile.
And this is where we turn the whole fish into different products, from fillets to frozen and fresh. Where are you exporting to? We have a large international market, and our biggest importers for our fresh salmon are the United States, Brazil and China. We also export smoked salmon to places like the US and Japan.
My name is Javier Soto, I am the manager of the smoking plant. I've been working in this factory for almost 10 years. So it's cold in here, isn't it? Yeah, this place is the raw material reception. So every raw material is prepared in the other factory you saw before. Got piles.
of salt in front of us the salt from the Atacama Desert. This is our recipe we use it this is salty with a combined with brown sugar it depends on the recipe or what market we are selling the products we use a different amount of salt and sugar okay so in this case we are using 90% of salt and 10% of brown sugar because it's going to
American market so this is our principal consumer of our product we produce so this factory can produce 300 tons of final product per month the recipes can have a 13 minutes or until 6 hours it depends what market you are saying for example Japan they love the smell of the smoke
Salmon eggs were originally brought over to Chile from the United Kingdom at the end of the 19th century and released into rivers, lakes and the sea to grow into fish for recreational fishing. Salmon are an anadromous fish which means they can spend part of their lives in freshwater streams and part in salty seawater. They hatch in freshwater, migrate to the ocean to grow and then return to freshwater to reproduce.
The boom for commercial salmon farming took off in the 1980s when more than 30 salmon farms were operating in Chile and the country became one of the biggest producers of salmon in the world. These days the hatcheries where the eggs develop, the tanks, the net pens out at sea and the processing plants are all in the south of Chile which has the best conditions for salmon farming. This is because of cold, clean and oxygen-rich water.
Away from the noisy processing plant in one of the much quieter meeting rooms, the chief corporate officer at Multiex, Francisco López, tells me why he thinks salmon farming has been so important for the economy in the south of Chile. Salmon is important for the south of Chile because it's been part of an industrial revolution. There used to be a lot of poverty in the region
And now many people earn more than other parts of Chile. Because of the industry, a lot of support services have sprung up which benefit the families living here. Francisco says these are things like transport services, hotels and restaurants for workers, laboratories, fish food and maintenance. He also explains how much the region has changed because of the industry. The south of Chile is a huge area...
where it's often difficult for people to get around and they live in remote communities. Their income came from things like fishing, forestry and tourism.
But it was often seasonal work. Salmon farming has given them permanent work and development. He shows me a slick PowerPoint presentation with lots of graphs, glossy photos and numbers. One of the main takeaways is that with the world population growing all the time, we need to find better ways to feed it. And for Francisco, salmon's a good option. A protein...
It's a protein which is highly sustainable. Compared with other protein sources, like different types of meat, it uses less water and less land.
It produces less carbon dioxide than beef, pork and chicken. And it's an animal where you can use many different parts of its body. Not everyone in Chile is positive about the salmon industry. Environmental groups often criticise its use of antibiotics and pesticides used to fight diseases and parasites. They say the overuse of antibiotics can create bacterial resistance, which could harm marine and human health.
But people like Francisco and others I spoke to point out antibiotics are widely used in other meat industries and that they always follow industry and government regulations. He's also adamant that there's no trace of antibiotics in the salmon when they're exported and it's safe to eat. This isn't the only issue concerning the industry's critics.
Flavia Liberona, executive director of Fundación Terram.
Flavia is the executive director of TEDAM, a foundation that promotes sustainable development. It's part of a campaign called Salvemos la Patagonia, or Save Patagonia. Flavia tells me about their goals.
Well, the campaign Salvemos la Patagonia is made up for more than 50 organizations, including ours, which is a part of an alliance of groups that wants to defend and protect Patagonia. One of the issues is the salmon farms operating there. One of our objectives is to stop them operating in the national parks,
where they have salmon farms, and to ensure they follow the regulations in place for them. She explains that the salmon industry started in regions near Puerta Montt and in the island of Chiloé, and then spread much further down south to remote areas. Many of the licenses to be allowed to farm the salmon were granted in the 1970s and 80s. In Chile there are...
In Chile, there are nearly 1,400 concessions, which is a license where salmon farms can operate. Around a third of those have been granted in protected areas. We think that the salmon industry here in Chile and in other parts of the world has an environmental impact, which means they shouldn't be farming in these protected areas.
They are often sea waters which are part of the national reserves or parks and they have been given licenses and we want them to leave the protected areas. We're not saying we want the salmon farming industry to end in Chile, but that they stop operating in these areas.
The salmon farming caused various environmental problems. One is that the fish are kept in cages and fed with pellets.
A lot of the pellets end up on the seabed and that leads to less oxygen, which kills the sea life in the oceans and the nistic ages and depending on the current, elsewhere in the sea. Flavia Liberona. This is Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
When you have bars in the sky, onboard showers and award-winning in-flight entertainment, it's no surprise that Emirates was recently named the best airline in the world. We fly you to over 140 destinations and with partners across the globe, we connect you to another 1,700 cities across six continents. So when we say we're also the largest international airline, what we really mean is...
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Quality, reliability, efficiency. That's the legacy of Toyota. Visit BuyAToyota.com, the official website for deals to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. I'm Jane Chambers in Chile, finding out about a key Chilean export, salmon.
Flavia and other members of Save Patagonia want to remove salmon farming licenses or concessions as they're known within national parks and national reserves. I put Flavia's concerns to Arturo Clement, the president of Salmon Chile, an organization that represents many of the main companies that produce and supply salmon and trout in Chile. There are different categories regarding the conservation sectors. The highest one are the national park.
And there's another one that are the reserves. In terms of concession on the national park, we have 21 concession on the national park.
where they are not operating. And we asked to the government that we don't want to be there, we want to be relocated out of the national park. And this was a request for us since many, many years ago. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy and political things delay a lot that decision. And in the reserves,
by the Chilean law is able to have conservation and also production.
So that is totally different. We have more than 300 concessions under some reserves, especially in the Isen area and Marallanes area, but always has been able to be producing salmon there. So people try to confuse it. We fully agree that on the national park, which is full conservation, we cannot be there. And we are there because
only because those parks were created after we have the concession. So we never file a concession in a national park, but it's a totally different point where we can be on the reserve, which is a mixed sector and that's been defined by the Chilean law since many, many years ago.
Look, here in Marcachi we have another intelligence.
Technicians and engineers show me how they monitor the fish and the conditions of the water, things like salt, oxygen and the currents. And with this information, they can work out when or when not to feed the fish and how much to give them. It looks a bit like an old-fashioned video game with pellets highlighted on the screen. They use artificial intelligence and an algorithm to detect the pellets. And if they're going too far down towards the seabed,
They know the fish don't need more food and stop feeding them. Fish food is one of the most expensive parts of salmon farming and they told me that as well as helping the environment by not having pellets on the seabed, it's in their interest not to waste food. Ferries take passengers across to Chilauea, an island more than 1,200 kilometres south of the capital Santiago. It's often seen as the cradle of salmon farming in Chile.
My role
My role is to connect people. These days, the different companies and their workers have a lot more information, which means they can explain to people how the industry works. Pablo says he thinks there's a lot of misinformation about the industry, and it's part of his work to combat misconceptions. In my hands, I'm holding all the work we did last year when we invited more than 800 people from the Biobio region to Magellanes.
We had everyone from politicians, locals, the industry to the military taking part in discussions about the future of salmon farming. And they flagged up different things, which we're looking at. Someone wanted more information about the industry because they had seen so much negative press, which is our duty to address. Here in Chiloé, workers are worried that more reliance on artificial intelligence is going to mean job losses, and we need to give them job security as well as working with new technologies.
So what does the future of salmon farming hold, not just for Chile, but globally? I put that question to Matt Craze, the founder and lead researcher of Spheric Research, an independent research house which specialises in global seafood markets, agriculture and emerging technologies. He tells me that some countries are starting to look at other species apart from salmon. In America, you're starting to see a species called yellowtail. It's called Ceriola and Ceriola
It's been farmed in Japan for a long time, following World War II, when fishing ports were bombed in Japan. And it's a really good sushi fish. And there is now a facility that grows yellowtail entirely on land in the Netherlands and in Denmark, actually. And we're now seeing that there could be more of these types of facilities in America, even in Chile as well, to grow this species.
It's not just yellowtail, there's farmed cod as well. That's a rapidly growing industry in Norway. There's farmed halibuts. Matt's also been watching the impact of President Donald Trump's introduction of tariffs. He says there's a lot of uncertainty. But if further tariffs are brought in on Canada, it could offer an opportunity for Chile, which is the biggest salmon supplier to the United States, followed by Norway and Canada.
Chile has a free trade agreement with the United States. So in theory, there's no tariffs. Canada has been historically...
the smaller but still quite significant seller of salmon to the US market. And it's anybody's guess what the tariff will end up as. But there's deep concern among the Canadian sellers that they've lost the US market or they've become less competitive in that US market. At least in the short term, Canada's loss could be Chile and Norway another big importer's gain. Another factor leading to more growth is adopting new technology.
The industry is adopting technology very quickly, especially in Norway and the Faroe Islands, where regulation is somewhat friendlier, I would say. These companies are figuring out how to submerge cages below the sea. You go to cooler waters where there are less sea lice. They are growing bigger fish on land, so they're using very sophisticated technology.
recirculating technology to grow bigger salmon. And that's what we call the hybridization of the industry. The thing is, it's happening. The investments are happening in countries like Norway and the Faroe Islands. But in...
places like Chile and Canada and the UK, there's been less investment because the regulations are not maybe as friendly to investment. This is something Arturo Clement from Salmon Chile agrees with. Well, for us, it's been very difficult to grow because we have too many regulations.
we have too many conflicts regarding the use of the sea. We need to define a long-term strategy regarding salmon farming and also salmon farming regarding aquaculture for the future. So it's something that we need to discuss
with the future coming. Chile will hold general elections later this year. Regarding technology, Arturo points out that Chile was ahead of the curve with the inland tanks or recirculation systems, as they're also known, that Norway is currently investing in. These mean that salmon can spend longer in fresh water in a more controlled environment than the sea. We were the first country in the world to use recirculation systems in the early 2000s.
much before than Norway and the other countries of the world. And we use it in order to have hatcheries that have a better use of the water and better control of all the indicators in the hatchery.
Arturo tells me he's proud of the industry, which he's been involved with for the last 40 years. The animal farming industry in Chile is probably one of the biggest innovations in the last 40 years in Chile. That's all from Business Daily. Thanks for listening. I'm Jane Chambers, and if you've enjoyed the programme and want to hear more, search for Business Daily wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
When you have bars in the sky, onboard showers and award-winning in-flight entertainment, it's no surprise that Emirates was recently named the best airline in the world. We fly you to over 140 destinations and with partners across the globe, we connect you to another 1,700 cities across six continents. So when we say we're also the largest international airline, what we really mean is...
If you're going there, so are we. Book now on Emirates.com. Fly Emirates. Fly better.