Small-Scale Community Based Management of Marine Resources vs. Large-Scale Industrial Aquaculture in Chile

Chile has chosen different strategies to manage its rich marine resources while meeting the demands from domestic and increasing foreign markets. One strategy involves giving user (fishers, collectors of non-fish resources) organizations rights to manage and exploit certain target species in a public and limited area/volume of the sea in Management Areas for the Exploitation of Benthic Resources (MAEBR). This small-scale system coexists with large scale off shore fishing and coastal salmon aquaculture at industrial scale. These different production systems are affected differently by e. g. trade conditions, and are susceptible to disturbances such as diseases in different ways and to different extents. The present situation illustrates how the organization of the aquaculture sector itself may have contributed to the present precarious situation where the infectious salmon anemia virus has reduced salmon sizes and killed salmon at large scale. This has affected the Chilean economy, and new regulations and laws are now being implemented in order to make the salmon aquaculture sector less vulnerable. This paper discusses some issues under investigation in an ongoing project, where the Chilean system serves as one example of pulsing patterns in aquaculture and coastal resource extraction. The systems are discussed from a systems perspective, and some preliminary results from emergy assessments are presented.