Routine Losses,Continuous Improvement,and Warming Oceans: Risk and Uncertainty on Chile’s Aquaculture Frontier

Understanding Risk And Uncertainty

Managing risk is central to capitalism, and the relationship between perceptions of risk and decision making has preoccupied economists and anthropologists for nearly a century. Scholars generally agree that individuals faced with unpredictable outcomes attempt to convert uncertainty to risk by predicting the probability of potential outcomes through information gathering and small-scale experimentation (Chibnik, 2011: 71). ¹ There is also broad consensus that risk is distinct from uncertainty—a condition in which decision makers cannot predict the probability of different outcomes (Knight, 1971).

The distinction between uncertainty and risk is an important one, however my ethnographic analysis of Chilean aquaculture challenges the conventional wisdom that actors—even in a culture in which market-oriented logics have attained hegemony (Cárcamo-Huechante, 2007)—inevitably seek to convert uncertainty into calculable risk. Put simply, uncertainty is productive for both aquaculture firms and managers in distinct yet connected ways.

In this article, I consider risk and uncertainty as critical management instruments in the context of the blue economy. I examine how spatial and social technologies—including the creation of new boundaries, enforcement of strict labor practices, and selective interpretations of the law—represent linked strategies for managing ecological and economic risks and sustaining the growth of salmon aquaculture in Chile, often with social and environmental costs. I also examine how the aquaculture industry is discursively framed as beset by uncertainty and subject to unpredictable changes in climate. I argue that this framing represents a strategy for managing political risks by blunting criticism that the industry contributes to algal blooms and other environmental disasters (Bouwman et al., 2013).

Yet I also take seriously the claims of aquaculture managers as well as those of state officials. In addition to managing risks, these actors navigate the uncertainty of a changing coastal environment. In the short term, managers accept this uncertainty and capture unpredictable profits by externalizing costs. In the long-term, they attempt to convert incalculable uncertainty into calculable risk where it is advantageous to do so, learning from past mistakes and anticipating a sustainable future in which their industry generates predictable profits with few environmental impacts. Many managers and state officials recognize salmon farming’s role in reshaping the ecology of southern Chile and its contribution to recent environmental disasters, but for them the benefits of this industry, which they believe can and will be made sustainable, outweigh these costs.

In the first half of this article, I survey the recent history of salmon aquaculture in Chile and industry efforts to manage ecological risks through the introduction of new spatial technologies and manage economic risks through the introduction of new social technologies, including increased surveillance and the exclusion of certain types of workers. I argue that the introduction of these spatial and social technologies facilitates “ocean grabbing” (Bennett et al., 2015). In the second half, I interrogate the narrative of “continuous improvement” and its relationship to adopting practices developed in Norway, where salmon aquaculture began. I conclude by suggesting that the invocation of uncertainty itself constitutes a social technology (Michaels, 2008) for managing political risk, undermining criticism of aquaculture’s environmental impacts and allowing the industry to regulate itself.

Managing Ecological Risk: Concessions, Barrios, And Macrozones

The Aysén Region in southern Chile constitutes an aquaculture frontier, akin to other resource frontiers that advance and retreat according to fluctuations in global market demands and new capitalist claims (Cons and Eilenberg, 2019; Tsing, 2003), as well as the designs of state planners and policies (Li, 2007). These plans and policies “depend on a simplified view of the landscape that deliberately realigns relations between people and space, often with unintended consequences” (Eilenberg, 2014: 159). Chile’s aquaculture frontier is no exception: after nearly forty years, the fjords of southern Chile have been divided into concessions, “neighborhoods,” and macro-zones in the name of efficient and sustainable production.

It was not always this way. The aquaculture frontier began to assume its current form in the mid-1980s, when salmon farms were established near Puerto Montt around the Chiloé Archipelago. The industry was promoted by dictator Augusto Pinochet’s economic advisers, who saw aquaculture as a means to diversify the export sector and develop the far south (Barton and Fløysand, 2010). ² American financiers and Japanese scientists partnered with Chilean firms to develop the first salmon farms (Swanson, 2015). Later, Chilean companies, including the seafood company Frio Sur and food giant Agrosuper S.A., started their own operations, but these were far from the technically advanced Japanese projects piloted elsewhere. Workers fed fish by hand, distributing more fish meal than was necessary for the caged salmon below them (interview, Reuben Leal, October 16, 2017) and creating mountains of nutrient rich deposits—not only fishmeal but also feces—below cultivation centers.

Salmon aquaculture also reshaped coastal life as companies opened factories where thousands came to work processing fish (Bustos-Gallardo, 2017). Eventually, as a result of the saturation of the Los Lagos region and a series of unanticipated environmental disasters—consequences of the aquaculture sector’s haphazard early years—the industry expanded into Aysén, where fewer people lived along the coast and waters could still reasonably be called “pristine.” This move brought different changes to Aysén than it did to Los Lagos, but in Aysén today roughly 165 centers are operational at any given time (interview, Jorge Padilla Trujillo, July 25, 2018) and the region produces nearly 50 percent of Chile’s farmed salmon (SERNAPESCA, 2016). ³

One of the reasons that the industry’s impact in Aysén has been different than in Los Lagos is the effort that aquaculture operators have put into improving efficiency and mitigating losses by protecting the marine environment. New regulations were enacted in the wake of the Infectious Salmon Anemia (ISA) crisis that devastated Chilean salmon stocks from 2007-2010. Technical advances across the industry automated and standardized operations (Lien, 2015), and workers became more familiar with the fish, allowing them to identify and isolate unhealthy individuals (Blanco, Arce, and Fisher, 2015).

A critical intervention was the creation of the barrio (neighborhood) system for cultivation centers and the grouping of concessions into these defined areas with similar environmental characteristics. According to aquaculture operators and state officials, the introduction of this spatial technology represented a major innovation with profound environmental benefits. In the barrio system, firms operating within each barrio are collectively responsible for its environmental and sanitary conditions (Honoso et al., 2016: 144), incentivizing operators to cooperate to ensure that the fish and the wider marine ecosystem remain healthy. Concessions leased to individual companies are grouped into barrios and these, in turn, are grouped into macro-zones, which are overseen by different offices of SERNAPESCA (the National Service for Fishing and Aquaculture), creating a nested system to manage risk by integrating economic growth and environmental responsibility. In practice this system makes the industry “legible” (Scott, 1998) to those overseeing it but, for several reasons, does little to ameliorate the environmental or social impacts of the sector in remote coastal communities in Aysén where concessions are granted.

First, concessions, barrios, and macro-zones are all designated with fixed spatial boundaries. Like fisheries and marine conservation areas, these zones are clearly defined on charts and satellite maps, yet are virtually meaningless in practice, when tides and currents render their boundaries irrelevant and toxins, waste, and other contaminants freely cross imaginary lines. This model, based on land-based systems for granting property and use rights, “obscures the interconnected character of the coastal environment” (Tecklin, 2016: 285).

Second, the conditions that pushed the epicenter of the aquaculture industry from Los Lagos to Aysén also pushed workers as companies realized that it was cheaper to hire experienced workers from Puerto Montt than to train workers in Aysén. Furthermore, the ISA crisis demonstrated to managers the need for more sanitary practices and rapid responses to die-offs, both of which were easier to implement and maintain with experienced workers. Those living in Aysén were quickly branded “unreliable” or “lazy” compared to their northern counterparts. Managers complained that they did not show up on time or at all, even as companies declined to provide the training or wages that would incentivize ayseninos, as those from the region are known.

Managing Economic Risk: Surveillance, Exclusion, And Imported Labor

For most of those who are able to work on the pontones, the sophisticated floating structures where aquaculture workers live and monitor the growth and health of the fish, the job is ideal. They enjoy hot food, cable television, and high-speed internet—all in exchange for a few hours of work that they can do, as one aquaculture worker told me, “in their pajamas,” and a willingness to spend two weeks at a time away from their families. The process of farming fish requires workers to be on-site every day and workers routinely miss Christmas, New Years, and family birthdays. This is, according to most workers I spoke with, the hardest part of the job. Moreover, several workers compared their time on-site to living in a monastery, since there are “no women” and alcohol is strictly prohibited.

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Figure 2.

Photograph of workers at the conclusion of their 14-day shift aboard a pontón.

In recent years, pontones and the cages beneath them have been subject to another technical innovation—the deployment of on-site security cameras. Initially, cameras placed underwater enabled workers to identify and isolate unhealthy fish (Blanco et al., 2015). Increasingly, however, cameras have been installed above the surface to monitor traffic to and from cultivation centers, as well as the workers themselves. An aquaculture firm owned by the Mitsubishi Corporation, has even installed cameras in the laboratories aboard its pontones so that fish necropsies can be observed by experts on land (interview, Jorge Padilla Trujillo, June 6, 2018).

Despite the isolation from family, transient lifestyle, and increased surveillance, most workers I spoke to were satisfied because of the pay offered for offshore work: between 1.5 and 2 million Chilean pesos per month ($2,050-2,750 USD). When the weather is bad, workers who have completed their shifts are often stranded in remote ports for days at a time waiting for a lancha rápida (motorboats contracted by aquaculture firms), the ferry, or a chartered plane to take them to the mainland, but they are financially compensated for this time. While they wait, they spend hours watching television beside their packed bags, drying wet socks, and sharing memes with friends and coworkers via WhatsApp.

Virtually all of those who work on the pontones are from outside of the Aysén region—and they are nearly all men. In the early days of the industry, when salmon farms in the Los Lagos region were close to shore and accessible by road, aquaculture workers did not live on-site. During this period there were more women working in the industry, often as kukis (cooks) but also feeding fish and tracking their growth. Today, as centers have moved farther offshore to comply with sanitation standards implemented after the ISA crisis, far fewer women work at cultivation centers. Aquaculture managers justify their preference for male workers by arguing that women are unfit for offshore work that often requires brute strength, yet they also claim that women can “cause problems” or “distractions” among men who spend weeks at a time away from home. Risk management—both risks to workers and risks supposedly posed by workers—is used to justify selective employment at cultivation centers. Whatever the justification, the result is that women have been largely shut out of more lucrative—and typically less physically demanding—work in the sector. This has the effect of limiting their earning potential and transforming offshore cultivation centers into almost exclusively masculine environments. ⁴

Instead, women work at the processing plants where fish are prepared for export. Not only are they considered more reliable than men working in this capacity—particularly in Aysén, where the male workforce is notorious among managers for absenteeism—but they also work for lower wages. Factory jobs, however, require long hours in cold, damp conditions. Furthermore, workers in plants like those in Puerto Chacabuco are considered “unskilled”—in contrast to those working on the pontones whose experience and technical expertise justifies flying them in from outside the region—and therefore enjoy no job security.

Like work at offshore cultivation centers, work in the factories takes place around the clock. Given the long hours, lack of job security, and low pay, it is hardly surprising that longtime residents of Aysén choose to work elsewhere when afforded the opportunity, leading to the problem of “rotation,” where workers are trained but only work for two or three months before they quit and must be replaced (interview, Vilma Cavieres, April 12, 2018). In response to this problem, aquaculture and industrial fishing firms operating processing plants in Puerto Chacabuco hire Haitian and Colombian immigrants.

The feminization of the workforce in fish factories and at other export-oriented production sites in the wake of Chile’s neoliberal “reforms” has been well documented (Schurman, 2004; Tinsman, 2004) as has the use of immigrant or migrant labor in fields and factories around the world (Holmes, 2013; Steusse, 2016). In Aysén, the need for migrant workers is the result of local workers avoiding jobs where the work is tedious, the pay is low, and conditions are difficult. For aquaculture firms, the employment of outsiders represents another risk management strategy. Whereas longtime residents have extended kinship networks that afford them opportunities to work in other sectors and abandon the tedium of the fish processing plants, newcomers’ isolation makes them more likely to remain on the factory floor. Moreover, their limited local networks—along with high wages relative to those back home—make them more willing to tolerate difficult working conditions. Numerous ayseninos told me that they would like to work on pontones and enjoy the modern luxuries that this work affords, yet since they cannot break into this work due to their lack of experience or education, they forgo working in the industry altogether.

Moreover, as the aquaculture industry exhausted resources available in the Los Lagos region and moved south, the mobile workforce based in Los Lagos was able to leverage its experience and investments in the industry—in steel boats and heavy equipment like air compressors and cranes—to retain skilled or semi-skilled employment even as job sites shifted to Aysén. Workers from Los Lagos with more experience and access to capital were able to out-compete less experienced workers from Aysén, who amounted to a less disciplined workforce and who were ambivalent about working the tedious hours demanded by the industry.

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Figure 3.

Photograph of Frio Sur facility in Puerto Chacabuco.

But the arrival of immigrants and the refusal of many ayseninos to work full-time in the region’s processing plants helps reinforce a narrative among aquaculture operators that ayseninos are “ungrateful,” “unreliable,” or “lazy.” Projecting these characteristics onto the local population also justifies and facilitates aquaculture operators’ militant secrecy and security. As noted previously, many cultivation centers are now equipped with surveillance cameras; stories about opportunistic locals stealing equipment, breaking cages, or poaching fish circulate widely in industry publications, in local newspapers, and on social media. In contrast to these “thieves and opportunists,” those supervising the aquaculture sector present themselves as sensible, middle-class professionals who, lamentably, must deal with these problems to maintain order and profitability. Many such professionals work in aquaculture-adjacent jobs as well, in laboratories that analyze everything from shipments of eggs to water quality to levels of antibiotics, in schools paid for by aquaculture firms, or in government agencies tasked with regulating and optimizing the industry.

Alfredo, ⁵ for example, came to Puerto Aysén to work in this sector after finishing his studies in Concepción. He worked for a Chilean aquaculture firm before starting his own home-laboratory with his then-girlfriend and doing contract work. This provided the young couple with enough income to buy a new Chinese SUV and move into a bigger house. After their breakup and the dissolution of their lab, Alfredo took a temporary job working on a well-boat used to transport live fish from centers in Aysén to factories at Quellón, on the southern tip of Chiloé. This work didn’t last long, not because the company didn’t have work for a well-educated laboratory technician, but because the passage between Aysén and Chiloé crosses the notoriously rough Gulf of Corcovado. Most of those working on boats servicing cultivation centers and transporting salmon hail from maritime communities like Talcahuano, Ancud, and Castro and are inured to the extreme weather that defines these journeys, but for a well-educated penquista, ⁶ the rough crossings proved too much; Alfredo gets seasick.

Elisa, another young professional, came from Santiago to work in a lab, though like Alfredo, she has since found other employment,

I am here because of the salmoneras. I came in 2013 because of my training and I worked in the lab—the only lab that they had [in Puerto Aysén] at that time—running tests for the salmoneras. That was at the end of the ISA crisis. At the time, when the ISA came, they didn’t give the fish antibiotics. . . that’s why they were wiped out. Now they give them injections because things have changed. (interview, October 6, 2017)

Elisa went on to explain that things have changed for her too, since she now has a child and works as a science teacher in two local schools, including a local catholic colegio (high school). This private school ⁷ in Puerto Aysén was founded by the CEO of Frio Sur and his wife. Frio Sur, which at the time had both industrial fishing and salmon farming operations throughout Aysén, ⁸ has been operating in the region since 1985 and exerts an outsize influence on the region, particularly in Puerto Chacabuco, where its processing plant is located, and nearby Puerto Aysén. As the head of their syndicate explained to me with great pride, “Frio Sur es Aysén y Aysén es Frio Sur” (“Frio Sur is Aysén and Aysén is Frio Sur”). While the role of Frio Sur in establishing and funding the colegio helps shield the company from criticism, in this case it was a happy coincidence: the CEO and his wife had children and were concerned about the education they could receive in a frontier town like Puerto Aysén.

Chasing The Norwegians

Though ayseninos are a fractious group, everyone I talked to during my fieldwork could agree on one thing when it came to the various aquaculture firms operating in Aysén: the Norwegians were the best people to work for and had the most professional organization. Over and over, workers who spent time in the factories in Puerto Chacabuco told me how much better it was to work for Marine Harvest ⁹ than Frio Sur. Perhaps Frio Sur “is Aysén,” but ayseninos have a clear preference for the Norwegians, whom they insist “have another mentality because they are European and Nordic” (interview, Hugo Araya Leiva, February 3, 2018).

“They treat you like a colleague,” Marco, who has lived his whole life in Puerto Aysén, explained during our interview, elaborating on the differences between Marine Harvest and Frio Sur, both of which operate plants in Puerto Chacabuco. “[Marine Harvest] is better organized, and there’s better pay and better food. The way they work, you get a one-month contract, then a three-month contract, and finally an indefinite contract so they can ‘test’ you” (interview, December 11, 2017).

The fact that Marine Harvest “tests” workers before offering long-term contracts—partially in an effort to solve the “rotation” problem—reveals the proliferation of an “audit culture” (Strathern, 2000) within aquaculture firms, in which managers use supposedly objective measures to evaluate their workforce and promote a culture of individual responsibility that benefits the company (Shore and Wright, 2015: 430). Calculating the fitness of workers allows managers to assess how much risk they are assuming in terms of knowledge, skill, and dependability and base their hiring decisions on this assessment.

But these assessments frustrate local workers who are otherwise keen to work for Marine Harvest because of its reputation and benefits but who are accustomed to finding and maintaining work through subjective judgements and personal connections. As a former worker, Juanita, described it to me, “They are surely better [than Frio Sur]. . . they might not receive you though—they are always testing people first! So if they are not going to hire you in the end what is the point of going to them?” (interview, December 13, 2017).

It isn’t just the workers who have noted the better benefits and distinctive workplace culture of “the Norwegians.” Juan Pérez, a local official, described meetings between government agents and various salmoneras, and singled out Marine Harvest:

They have a ‘type’ of worker. When I walk into a meeting with various people from the salmoneras, I can always tell which ones are from Marine Harvest. They are tall. . . they have lots of blondes, weon, ¹⁰ so many blonde [men and women]! Where do they get them? And they are thin. . . and you look and they have a laptop out and an iPhone and they are taking notes, and weon, no one else [from the Chilean companies] is writing anything down, they don’t even have a notebook! (interview, February 23, 2018).

As previously noted, cultivation centers have become almost exclusively masculine environments, but the offices of state agencies like SERNAPESCA are also sites where most professionals are men. In Aysén, many public employees come for a short time and without their families. In this context, being around women whose appearance is deemed “more European” is not only desirable for male officials but also provides material for running jokes. That Marine Harvest employs Chileans, including men, whose height, blonde hair, and fair skin marks them as unusual and cuico (posh) enhances the company’s prestige.

The exceptionality of the Norwegians has also led Chilean firms to adopt elements of their culture, as Juan described in the same interview,

You can tell, just by looking at a list of the names of the cultivation centers of the various companies, which ones are in the X region ¹¹ because they all have Huilliche [indigenous] names, you know? And which ones are in the XII region because they have English names, because the islands were named by Darwin, you know, when he came in the Beagle. But here [Aysén was the XI Region] they have names from Norway. And you see it with the boats too! The boats with names like Thor, Odin, Heimdall. . . and it was so funny, because there was a boat called Don Francisco, right? And it’s a very Chilean name, you know. . . super Spanish, ¹² and it was rusty and so they restored it, gave it new paint, and now it’s ‘Heimdall’! Heimdall? ¹³ Weon, here?!?

Chilean politicians and professionals have a long history of embracing European policies and practices (Beckmann, 2009; Burns, 1980) and Norway’s success pioneering salmon farming makes this latest imitation understandable. Moreover, Chilean operators proudly claim that they are modeling their practices after Norwegian firms in order to emphasize their commitment to improving and meeting industry-wide standards. Marine Harvest’s highly organized operations also shape how those in aquaculture think of Norway and Scandinavia. Norway is first on the list of countries that Juan would like to visit. Hernán Rebolledo, regional representative of Salmon Chile (the association of Chilean salmon producers) has already visited Norway and describes his trip in glowing terms, noting the country’s lack of pollution, organized transportation, and general cleanliness (interview, Hernán Rebolledo, October 16, 2017).

Heather Swanson (2015) has described how Japanese aquaculture operations and the demand for salmon in the Japanese market has created “shadow ecologies” in southern Chile. What has come to exist in Aysén might fairly be considered a “shadow economy” in which the success of Chilean salmon aquaculture depends on operators and government officials adopting practices and regulations first developed in Norway, where the sector has a longer history and where environmental laws are stricter. At the same time, they monitor Norwegian aquaculture firms to predict the rise or fall of salmon prices in the global marketplace, just as Norwegians watch Chile’s periodic environmental crises and “mass mortality events.” Moreover, the Norwegian model—held up as superior by both Chilean supervisors and workers—provides endlessly moveable goal posts that operators use to demonstrate how they are continuously improving their own practices based on new strategies and practices in Europe. That the Chilean industry is worse for local ecologies is excusable provided operators chase the Norwegian ideal.

Managing Political Risk: Maintaining Uncertainty

In Puerto Aguirre, an island community at the epicenter of Aysén’s aquaculture industry, I shared a meal with workers from Aqua Chile—at that time, the largest Chilean aquaculture firm. Davíd, Jose, Roberto, and Cristian had finished a two-week shift at a nearby cultivation center. It was mid-June and the winter weather had set in, making the men even more eager than usual to get home. The following day, they were to head to the island’s airstrip and fly to Puerto Montt. From there, Davíd, Jose, and Roberto would board a bus and ride fourteen hours to Viña del Mar, the largely affluent seaside town just north of Valparaíso. The men explained that they would have seven days off before returning to Aysén for another fourteen-day shift atop the floating cages where their “crop,” in this case trout, would be treated with antibiotics, fed, and eventually “harvested.”

Roberto, the team’s manager, eagerly told me about the team’s work, adjusting his thick glasses as he talked. He was frustrated the industry was criticized for contaminating, and argued that everyone contaminates “unless your car or your boat runs on water?”

He paused before answering his own question, “no, of course not, it runs on petroleum. The thing is to make sure people are implementing ‘best practices’ in order to contaminate the environment as little as possible. For this we have to have mejora continua (continuous improvement) but this is what we do. We learn from the past.”

He complained about Greenpeace, the environmental NGO that documented the tons of dead marine life that washed ashore during the 2016 red tides in the Chiloé archipelago and accused salmon producers of “poisoning” the sea, saying Greenpeace provided a “fun job” for those who belong to the NGO. But he lamented that the different aquaculture firms are in competition with each other “because obviously they are all private enterprises” and therefore did not share information he believed was critical to reducing contamination. This lack of cooperation not only means companies fail to share vital information, it also undermines one of the objectives behind the barrio system: that firms take collective responsibility for environmental and sanitary conditions within these designated areas.

While I had heard much of this before, what Roberto said next surprised me.

“When I go home to Viña [del Mar], I don’t tell people what I do, because of how stigmatized it is in some circles to be working in salmon aquaculture.” He continued, “only my family knows, because I don’t tell anyone else. And if they ask where I work, I just say ‘in the south’ and if they ask in what, I just say ‘work’ and talk about something else.”

This theme of contamination—and a general defensiveness about it—came up in other interviews. Ivan, a mechanic who works on a boat out of Puerto Montt that services cultivation centers, bemoaned the attitude of other mechanics at his company, complaining that a good engine can run forever but explaining that because his boat belongs to the company, there is little incentive for the other mechanics to see its engine as an investment worth caring for. He guessed that the average engine on a boat like his now lasts ten years or less, describing how “the regulations are a joke for the workers. When they have to change the oil. . . they just send it overboard.”

“Farming” the ocean also means contending with losses. Monocultures are vulnerable to commodity diseases that can wipe out entire stocks (Soluri, 2011) and plunge markets into turmoil. In this context, “routine losses” are considered acceptable whereas “mass mortality events” are not. In laboratories—usually on land, but increasingly at cultivation centers—veterinarians examine fish suspected to have died of ISA or other infectious diseases and report their findings to SERNAPESCA. Subcontractors vacuum dead fish out of cages before they can spread disease and dispose of the fish in terrestrial landfills where they will not contaminate the water column. This unpleasant job is one of the few available to ayseninos who wish to work in the aquaculture sector—provided they have their own equipment.

As of 2018, however, Aysén did not have landfills that could process the side effects of the massive die-offs that periodically plague the industry. Dead and diseased fish were to be transported to the Los Lagos region by sea and disposed of there. In the case of “routine losses” it made better economic sense to dispose of fish at sea, something multiple aquaculture workers told me was commonplace, even as they clarified that it didn’t happen at the cultivation centers where they worked.

This is a common refrain. It is almost always someone else doing the contaminating, however, rather than the subject of the interview. In general, those working in the sector are quick to explain that while there is plenty of contamination as plastic, motor oil, and organic materials are dumped from cultivation centers and the boats that service them, they are not guilty of such things. Like other extractive industries, however, the sheer scale of aquaculture production means that the introduction of toxic material into the water column—along with organic material that contributes to the proliferation of toxic algae—is widespread. As in mining, costs are externalized, and toxic materials build up slowly through routine practices. Over time, however, this externalization of costs contributes to disasters—in particular, harmful algal blooms—capable of devastating both the industry and local ecologies.

Even among those concerned with the environment, however, the fact that the aquaculture sector is “un poco contaminante” (“a little contaminating”) is not enough to outweigh the benefits that the industry has brought to Aysén. Indeed, the CEO of Aqua Chile, Victor Hugo Puchi, opposed the HydroAysén project on the grounds that it would be too disruptive for the landscape and communities along the Pasqua and Baker Rivers. Aqua Chile, Los Fiordos, and Marine Harvest have sponsored beach cleaning events and educational programs for local students, and when a lack of public funds threatened the 2018 Fiesta del Pesca’o Frito (Festival of Fried Fish) in Puerto Cisnes—an event that typically draws thousands of tourists—Aqua Chile, Los Fiordos, Marine Farm, and Bella Vista sponsored the event.

Climate change, particularly the warming southern Pacific, is also a frequent topic of discussion among aquaculture professionals. As algal blooms have become more common, severe, and prolonged, there is an emerging scientific consensus that warmer ocean temperatures are a contributing factor (Anderson, 2012; Glibert et al., 2018). The warming planet, plastic strewn beaches, and extreme weather events are invoked frequently by actors within the aquaculture sector. Indeed, on a national level, the government of Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014 and 2018-2022) approved a ban on plastic bags to create “a healthy culture of recycling” and protect the country’s nearly 4,000 miles of coastline (Bonnefoy, 2018). Yet in the same year, Piñera’s Minister of National Assets, Felipe Ward, approved a reduction of the newly nationalized Parque Patagonia ¹⁴ in order to facilitate gold mining by the Australian firm Equus Mining.

On the surface, this all seems contradictory: the CEO of an aquaculture firm which occupies scores of concessions throughout Aysén is opposed to a major hydroelectric project because it would displace local people; the government in Santiago is banning plastic bags throughout the country to reduce pollution, but shrinking its network of parks to accommodate an industry with a history of contaminating the landscape; aquaculture workers decry the carelessness of their peers in dealing with waste, but insist that it is always someone else who is dumping oil or organic materials into the Southern Ocean.

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Figure 4.

Photograph of the 2018 Fiesta del Pesca’o Frito (Festival of Fried Fish) in Puerto Cisnes.

This apparent contradiction has become increasingly common, however, as powerful corporations bolster their image by conserving certain areas while creating sacrifice zones elsewhere (Vlachou, 1997). It also illustrates several ways in which Chilean aquaculture firms, with state support, ¹⁵ undermine their critics as they “shape the world in accordance with their pursuit of profit, growth, and legitimacy” (Benson and Kirsch, 2010: 459). Minor, everyday acts of contamination are discursively normalized, and therefore do not necessitate political action or ethical consideration (Povinelli, 2011). Disavowal by corporate polluters—enabled by a state that prioritizes economic growth above all else—means that obvious connections are denied (Fortun, 2014: 319). This disavowal is made easier by the deployment of corporate social technologies (Kirsch, 2014; Rogers, 2012) that seek to confuse marine science, deny access to sites where contamination takes place, insist corporate actors handle clean-up efforts, and limit the connection-making that is essential to apprehending the harm caused by industrial capitalism. Plastic floats, mooring balls, nylon lines, and motor oil containers wash ashore along the sparsely populated Chilean coastline and only a small fraction of these come from the fishing sector. Yet by sponsoring social events and beach clean-ups, aquaculture firms reinforce the narrative that the salmoneras are “bonita” (lovely), even if they are “a little contaminating.”

When fish pens break due to extreme winds and waves, and hundreds of thousands of non-native fish treated with antibiotics enter the wild, aquaculture operators act with impunity—even bending laws that they helped author. After roughly 900,000 fish escaped from a cultivation center operated by the Norwegian firm Marine Harvest in the Los Lagos region, the company paid fishers to catch the escaped salmon, despite a national law that prohibits fishing salmon on the grounds that allowing fishers access to this lucrative species would encourage them to poach salmon from cultivation centers. This widely reported story—of an aquaculture operator paying fishers a bounty to capture escaped salmon which could potentially threaten native species—promoted a narrative in which these companies clean up their messes, and do so by partnering with local people, even as it demonstrated the power of corporations to bend or break the law when they deem it necessary or expedient.

Escapes nonetheless fuel criticism. After the Marine Harvest escape, Juan explained what a headache it was for him to deal with calls from media outlets:

It’s always the same thing. This happened in the X Region, so I tell them that I only work in the XI Region, and I am not responsible for what happens there, and I don’t have information for this reason. . . even though I have been talking to my counterpart up there, obviously. But this situation combines everything. If people talk about the salmoneras as a polemic, they talk about three things: the use of antibiotics, the escape of fish, and the massive mortality, like what happened in Puerto Montt in 2007. And they are talking about these things in Santiago! They are reporting broken cages and the escape and they are explaining how these fish are not fit for human consumption [because of how recently they were treated with antibiotics] in Santiago. And for Santiago? Weon, this is nothing to them!

This criticism puts aquaculture proponents—whether operators or public officials—on the defensive. As Juan’s response to media criticism and “polemics” makes clear, he sees himself as an expert who understands the appropriate use of antibiotics, the ecological impact of escapes, and the potential for mass mortality events. He explicitly juxtaposes himself with those living in Santiago who don’t understand what is happening in Aysén. He, on the other hand, must navigate the uncertainty generated by Aysén’s highly variable coastal environment and changing climate. He feels it should be left to experts to diagnose and respond to problems—continuously improving the aquaculture industry in the process—and, like others producing monocultures for the global market, he denounces warnings about negative environmental and social impacts as unscientific (Gudynas, 2008: 515). Interference from outsiders is bad because, as Juan implies, they fail to understand or care about the difference between the Los Lagos and Aysén Regions. Ironically, this insistence that those in Santiago—in this case journalists and environmentalists—fail to understand conditions along Chile’s aquaculture frontier echoes complaints made by local people in Aysén. The only difference is that locals complain not about journalists and environmentalists, but about state officials and aquaculture operators.

Conclusions

Despite the negative impacts of the industry, aquaculture managers like Roberto and public officials like Juan believe that aquaculture can deliver growth and sustainability through the introduction of new spatial and social technologies and the adoption of practices developed in Norway. Roberto genuinely wishes that competing firms share more information with one another because he believes that this would lead to “best practices” that would protect ecosystem services, benefiting everyone. Juan spends his spare time reading about new policies implemented in Norway and documenting infractions committed by operators who do not follow SERNAPESCA’s regulations. For these men, “continuous improvement” is more than just a slogan. Through their work to improve practices offshore and organize what they consider an unruly workforce, aquaculture operators and public officials come to see themselves as charismatic actors within Chile’s development project, managing risks and building a sustainable industry under difficult and unpredictable conditions.

Yet the implementation of new spatial and social technologies to manage ecological and economic risks has done little to mitigate industrial salmon aquaculture’s impact on the environment or on local people.

Spatial technologies like concessions and barrios enclose spaces formerly held in common and—though they are supposed to encourage operators to cooperate to protect the environment—do little to improve sanitary practices and nothing to stop the spread of toxins, waste, and other contaminants. Social technologies like surveillance and the routine “objective” evaluation of workers exclude local people from the industry’s most lucrative jobs in the name of efficiency. Those who do find work in the aquaculture sector must accept the tedium of the factory floor and compete with immigrant or migrant laborers.

These spatial and social technologies have been implemented to prevent internal objects of risk—commodity diseases and parasites, poor sanitation, and unreliable workers—from causing unacceptable losses. But objects of risk among Chilean aquaculture operators also include external threats to the industry in the form of costly new regulations and criticism from international environmentalists that have led to boycotts (Latta and Cid Aguayo, 2012). This criticism has been elevated by concerns about climate change and increased scrutiny of industries once promoted as sustainable.

These concerns have created an opportunity for aquaculture proponents to deploy a new corporate social technology: invoking the uncertainty that operators face as they attempt to deliver blue growth while facing highly variable conditions along the southern coast, rising ocean temperatures, and other devastating symptoms of climate change. Since 2007, unprecedented environmental crises have undermined efforts to deliver sustainable, predictable yields from bounded, territorially fixed production sites. Risk management strategies have failed to stop the diffusion of waste and other contaminants through the water column or the escape of millions of farmed salmon. In the context of this uncertainty, “continuous improvement” is framed as the best aquaculture managers can deliver and they should be left to diagnose and respond to problems without outside interference. Thus, uncertainty not only shapes how individuals working in aquaculture see themselves and their industry but also shields the industry from criticism, managing political risks by creating an antipolitics in which solutions to environmental problems are considered to be the exclusive preserve of experts (Barbesgaard, 2018; Flannery et al., 2019).

By discursively framing aquaculture as one source of contamination among many and environmental crises as inevitable byproducts of climate change, aquaculture operators maintain uncertainty about their industry’s long-term sustainability. As long as “everyone contaminates,” the dumping of oil from boats servicing cultivation centers and the escape of fish treated with antibiotics remain routine, quasi-events—part of the “everyday cruddiness” of contemporary capitalism (Povinelli, 2011). As long as rising ocean temperatures make the industry’s impacts uncertain, aquaculture firms—seen by state officials as critical drivers of blue growth —can continue to take a reactive rather than proactive approach to the environmental crises that are becoming increasingly common along this remote, resource frontier.