Chilean Salmon Boom’s Hidden Costs to Workers, Rivers, And Communities

From Patagonian fjords to Mapuche rivers, Chile’s salmon boom has delivered export riches while leaving dead divers, poisoned waterways, and fractured communities in its wake, exposing a global seafood supply chain built on cheap risk, weak oversight, and environmental sacrifice.

Grief on the Patagonian Shore

From her small house facing the sea in Maullín, on the edge of Chilean Patagonia, Julia Cárcamo López can hear the gulls and the engines of the boats that sustain the town. Fishing and aquaculture are not just jobs here; they are the only real economy.

On May 1, 2019, that economy killed her husband. “Two men knocked on my door and told me they had bad news,” she recalled to The Guardian. “My husband had had an accident while working at sea.”

An autopsy later showed that 59-year-old diver Arturo Vera had been struck by a boat’s propeller while working at the Taraba salmon farm near Puerto Natales in Magallanes. He suffered injuries to his head, ribs, and throat. Divers say the impact came at a moment when, under safety rules, the engine should have been turned off.

After Vera’s death, the company was fined for labor and safety violations identified by a labor inspector. The family obtained compensation through the courts. The firm, approached by The Guardian, did not respond.

For Julia, the case is not just about a single accident, but about a system that normalizes risk. In Chilean Patagonia, the sea offers work – but increasingly on terms dictated by an industry that is both highly profitable and structurally dangerous.

A Booming Industry Built on Risk

Chile’s salmon farms, or salmoneras, are the world’s second-largest producers after Norway, and salmon is one of the country’s biggest exports. The fish are not native; the first specimens were imported from Norway more than 40 years ago under the Pinochet dictatorship.

From 1990 to 2017, salmon production in Chile grew nearly 3,000%, with exports exceeding 750,000 tons a year to over 80 countries. Chile is now the leading supplier of salmon to the United States, shipping 56,474 tons worth about US$760 million in just the first quarter of 2025. Exports to Europe have also surged.

Behind those numbers is a stark toll in human lives. “Over the last 12 years, the salmon industry in Chile has had the highest rate of accidents and deaths at work in the aquaculture sector globally,” said Juan Carlos Cárdenas of Ecoceanos, via The Guardian. “Between March 2013 and July 2025, 83 workers died in accidents in the sector.”

Norway, by comparison, has reported only three worker deaths in 34 years. As one Patagonian worker put it: “Those who eat Chilean salmon cannot imagine how much human blood it carries with it.”

The industry is also chemically intensive. Chilean operations used more than 351 tons of antibiotics in 2024, vastly more than Norway’s near-zero usage. Studies suggest 70–80% of these drugs end up in the water, fueling antimicrobial resistance and threatening marine ecosystems.

Small-scale fishers say their traditional livelihoods are collapsing. Sea urchins, mussels, and other species have become scarce near salmon cages, which leak waste, uneaten feed, and chemicals. For many coastal communities, development has arrived alongside ecological decline.

Even Chile’s regulators admit they are outmatched. Labor inspector Jorge Ampuero González oversees 30 remote farms with a staff of seven and no boats or helicopters. “Realistically, we can visit each center once a year, at most twice,” he told The Guardian. “It is tough to change things with these tools.”

Rivers Turned Red in Mapuche Territory

Salmon farming’s impacts reach far beyond the sea. The industry begins in freshwater ecosystems where fertilization and hatching occur. In regions such as Araucanía and Los Ríos, Mapuche communities say their rivers have been contaminated and their traditions disrupted.

Near the Chesque River, the community of Chesque Alto has fought a long legal battle against a salmon company that has operated since 1998. In a wooden house by the river, Angelica Urrutia described what changed:

“Since the company set up shop, the fish in the river have disappeared, as has the rest of the wildlife, especially the birds. When they were forced to stop in 2021… the fish and other animals returned.”

Residents say parts of the Chesque have turned reddish and slimy, a pattern seen elsewhere near salmon facilities. Urrutia recalled four cows dying in 2005 after drinking near a drainage area. “The vet said they had ingested a lot of formalin,” she said, referring to a chemical widely used in Chilean salmon farming to kill parasites.

She says company representatives later offered to buy the family sheep. “They do this so they can continue to work in peace,” Urrutia told The Guardian. Some neighbors accepted similar “incentives.”

As a machi, an ancestral healer and spiritual authority, Urrutia sees the damage in cultural terms as well. “I can no longer gather the medicinal herbs that grow around the river,” she said. Sacred sites used for ceremonies have been polluted. During the company’s temporary shutdown, she said, “We were able to perform our sacred ceremonies in the river again. It was beautiful.”

The Cost Behind the Fillet

Chile’s salmon boom has connected remote fjords and rivers to global supply chains, feeding supermarket coolers from New York to Tokyo. But for communities such as Maullín and Chesque Alto, sustainability is not a marketing label; it is a diver who returns home alive, a river that doesn’t run red, a ceremony on uncontaminated shores.

And as long as the world’s demand for cheap salmon stays high, the invisible costs borne by workers, ecosystems, and Indigenous communities remain all too easy to ignore.

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