The Dark Side of Sustainability: Norway and the Rise and Fall of Salmon Farming in Chile. A transnational history of the future (1970-2030)

DARKLAX is the first interdisciplinary and transnational reconstruction of the history of salmon farming in Chile. We try to explain how a remote and impoverished spot in the South of Chile became a global hub for the experimentation with social, environmental, scientific and discursive technologies that are shaping the world for the last half a century. We ask how the efforts at transforming farmed salmon into a commodity sought to answer a myriad of challenges, from diversifying caloric intake to preventing overfishing, ultimately creating new problems that are at the core of the Anthropocene. A central question we ask is the role in this process of the concept of “sustainability,” and the practices associated to it. DARKLAX is a historical project working with a variety of approaches, from marine biology in order to decipher salmon life in the farms and beyond, to anthropology and storytelling to grasp the ways peoples experience the relation with more-than-human nature. Equally important, we see salmon farming as an intrinsically transnational object encompassing Norwegian technology, Brazilian soy, Japanese consumption patterns or Argentine environmental changes as defining features of the industry. As an object of study, salmon farming is not a niche or an anomaly: Today, aquaculture farming at large is the fastest growing sector of food production. It is valued at some three hundred billion dollars, involving twenty million jobs globally. Farmed fish provides today half of the world food, a number that is only expected to growth, in turn increasing current environmental challenges. At the center of these changes is Norway, the largest producer of farmed salmon and largest investor in Chile. DARKLAX explores how Norway have changed along the way. In particular, we analyze the ways in which its expansion in Chile reflects on the larger impact of Norway worldwide, in the global economy and in the exploitation of natural resources beyond its national borders.

The explosive development of the salmon farming industry in Chile, buttressed by massive Norwegian investment, has been hailed as an enormous success. Today, Norway produces 1,600,000 tons of farmed salmon annually, while Chile produces 695,000 tons; at any given moment, there is more biomass of farmed salmon than the rest of farmed animals combined in each country. Huge economic, social, and environmental benefits characterize this “Blue Revolution” that brings cheap, healthy protein to a booming world population: at least that is how it has appeared on the surface. However, recent research reveals a darker side to Chilean salmon farming and the role of Norway as its largest investor and inspiration. So-called sustainable practices turn out to decimate nature; local and indigenous populations protest problematic business practices; and the fish itself suffers disease and worse. The explosive development of salmon farming in Chile has turned out to be an unchecked experiment in an open-air laboratory, with catastrophic consequences whose full effects need to be studied. DARKLAX's main research question is threefold: 1) What are transformations associated with the growth of the salmon farming industry in Chile since the 1970s?; 2) How do these transformations provide insights into the future of salmon farming and into the relation between human and larger-than-human nature at large?; and 3) What is the role of Norway in this history? In pursuing this question, DARKLAX develops the first socio-environmental history of Chilean salmon farming from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. It tests a bold hypothesis: that the rise and fall of salmon farming in Chile is both defined by and advances new arguments for three central characteristics of the Anthropocene era: 1) the breakdown of the relation between technology and nature; 2) the collapse of the concept of “sustainability”; and 3) the absolutely global effects of localized biocommodification.