Chilean Salmon Industry Using Massive Amounts of Antibiotics

The Chilean government has reported that the country’s salmon farmers use roughly 350 times more antibiotics to control disease in fish pens than the Norwegian salmon farming industry. Chile’s Economy Ministry said that the country’s salmon operations used 718,000 pounds of antibiotics in 2008 and 850,000 pounds in 2007 — 350 to 600 times more than the roughly 2,000 pounds used in all of Norway’s salmon farms in 2008. Norway remains the world’s largest producer of farmed salmon and has developed vaccines to better control disease outbreaks in fish cages, where thousands of Atlantic salmon swim in tightly packed conditions. The Chilean salmon industry, the world’s second largest, has been plagued by outbreaks of infectious diseases that have killed tens of thousands of farmed salmon. Chile is the largest supplier of farmed salmon to the U.S., but concerns about environmental conditions at Chile’s fish farms have caused Wal-Mart and Safeway to recently reduce purchases of Chilean salmon.