The ISA crisis in Los Lagos Chile: A failure of neoliberal environmental governance?

Abstract

This paper discusses the Infectious Salmon Anemia (ISA) crisis that affected the salmon industry in Chile between 2007 and 2009. For nearly 30 years, the salmon industry grew exponentially to become one of the top five exporting sectors, and the face of the new Chile: globalized and democratic. I argue that the crisis showed cracks in the neoliberal environmental governance mechanisms followed by Chile during that period, raising questions about the need for socially restructuring the political economy relationship with the environment by increasing state oversight over the use of the natural landscape in which the industry produced, while allowing firms to continue their exploitation pattern and global exports of commodities as their accumulation strategy. Furthermore, the political solutions that were introduced tested the ideological reliance of neoliberal environmental governance mechanisms on science and knowledge production for providing appropriate answers.