Eight in favour, seven against.
On 15 December, the legislature of Tierra del Fuego passed a law permitting the industrial production of salmon by the slimmest of margins.
The Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego sits at the southern tip of South America. Its Beagle Channel and rugged coasts mark one of the planet’s remotest landscapes, and the capital, Ushuaia, serves as the gateway to Antarctica. It is often dubbed “the end of the world”.
Tierra del Fuego has long been known for something else, too: its largely intact ecosystems. Here, in a subantarctic realm of wind-swept forests, peat bogs and cold, nutrient-rich seas, wildlife thrives. Sea lions and dolphins ply the channels, southern right whales migrate through offshore waters, and seabirds – from albatrosses to cormorants to penguins – depend on the waters for feeding and breeding.
For many in the province, the new law means this can no longer be taken for granted.
Changing political tides
After the vote, the chamber fell silent.
“There was a strange feeling, as if [the legislators] were between a rock and a hard place,” says Nancy Fernández. She is president of the Mane’kenk Association (AM), an NGO dedicated to education and environmental conservation, and a researcher at the National University of Tierra del Fuego (UNTDF). “It was just a second, but they looked at us as if to say: ‘we had no other choice’,” she tells Dialogue Earth.
In 2021, a law was passed to the opposite effect: banning salmon farming in the lakes and seas around Tierra del Fuego. The then-legislator, Mónica Urquiza of the Fuegian People’s Movement (Mopof), welcomed everyone in to the legislature to celebrate. But at the December vote that has now overturned that ban, Fernández claims Urquiza – who has since become the legislature’s president – permitted just three civil society representatives to enter and observe.
“Today, as deputy governor and president of the legislative chamber, she prevented people from entering. And legislators who until last Friday said they would not support the bill voted in favour,” says Fernández.
The old law only allowed small-scale salmon production, with a cap of 50 tonnes per year per farm. Under the new law, there is no cap. Salmon farming is now only prohibited in the Beagle Channel, which separates the main island to the north from the smaller islands to the south.
“
Today, the salmon industry harvests more than one million tonnes per year. There are 1,380 concessions, of which 408 are in protected areas. The authorities have not properly regulated the industry.
Flavia Liberona, executive director, Terram Foundation
The initiative to change the law was promoted by the provincial governor Gustavo Melella, a member of the left-leaning Forja party. He had supported the ban on salmon farms, saying during a 2021 radio interview: “We have our own nature, our own local production, we don’t want to introduce other species. If we had any problems – as has happened in other places, as has happened in Chile – the disaster would be irreparable.”
Four years later, it was Melella who presented the legislature with the amendment bill. In December on social media, the governor argued it was necessary to “update and strengthen the regulatory framework for aquaculture development”, incorporating “the highest standards of environmental control”.
Definitions of these standards and several other key details will be decided when the law is implemented by the provincial government, which is due to happen by the end of this week: 15 March. The Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (Farn), a group of lawyers specialising in environmental law, tells Dialogue Earth the implementation is still pending.
Job creation or false hope?
Argentina is grappling with a prolonged economic crisis, marked by high inflation, currency instability and rising poverty.
It predates the current presidency of Javier Milei, who has been in office since December 2023, but it has continued and in some ways deepened under his administration’s sweeping austerity and market-reform agenda. As such, the arguments being made against the salmon ban by many of the same politicians who supported it four years previously are based on economic growth and job creation.
Diego Marzioni, the provincial undersecretary for fisheries and agriculture, told the regional news agency ADNSUR last year that salmon farming could generate “between 4,000 and 4,500 jobs”. Some academics and environmentalists question these figures.
Gustavo Lovrich, a researcher at Tierra del Fuego’s Southern Scientific Research Centre (CADIC), suspects the government’s change of position is related to the impact of eliminating import tariffs on electronic products. This federal measure was introduced in May 2025 and has impacted an industry that is concentrated in Tierra del Fuego. According to some estimates, this could mean the loss of almost a third of the electronics jobs in the province: 2,000-2,500.
The government insists promoting the aquaculture industry will increase employment. Fernández does not believe this will happen: “We told them to stop giving people false hope, because it is sad to do so in this context of crisis.”
Dialogue Earth contacted Diego Marzioni for comment but has not received a reply.
The cost of salmon
Native to the northern hemisphere, salmon was introduced to Chile more than a century ago. Commercial salmon production began during the late 1970s, on a small scale. By 2000, it was dominated by large corporations. Some experts warn that the problems is Chile now facing are a warning to Tierra del Fuego.
“Seventy per cent of native fish in Chile are facing conservation problems, because salmon are carnivorous and feed on native fish,” says Flavia Liberona, a Chilean biologist and executive director of the Terram Foundation (FT), a sustainable development NGO.
In 2007, there was a health crisis among the fish due to an outbreak of infectious salmon anaemia, which caused high mortality. This led to the expansion of farming into other regions as the industry sought new, infection-free waters.
“Today, the salmon industry harvests more than one million tonnes per year. There are 1,380 concessions, of which 408 are in protected areas. The authorities have not properly regulated the industry,” claims Liberona.
The Forum for the Conservation of the Patagonian Sea (FMP), which brings together 30 organisations from Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Uruguay, has detailed numerous negative impacts.
These include escaped salmon that harm the local environment; organic waste accumulations on the seabed near farms, which reduce oxygen levels and drive biodiversity changes; the production of harmful algal blooms; and excessive antibiotic use, which is potentially contributing to increased antimicrobial resistance among humans. Bringing these problems to Tierra Del Fuego could damage a relatively pristine region, say those opposed to the farms.
There are also questions over the economic feasibility of developing salmon farming in Tierra del Fuego. The industry is highly competitive and dominated by Norway and Chile. Salmon farms in the far south of Argentina would have to source fish and specialist supplies, get their salmon to markets far away, and attract skilled workers to the remote region.
“It is a highly complex industry; it is not enough to have [farms] in the sea,” Liberona stresses.
The problem of oversight
The new law states the provincial government must carry out a strategic environmental assessment to determine suitable areas for salmon farming, and that each proposed farm will be required to submit an environmental impact study. The secretariat of fisheries and aquaculture and the secretariat of the environment will be responsible for enforcing the law. How this will work will be determined when the law is implemented.
Some scientists and environmentalists doubt the local government has the ability to monitor and control farms. Fernández fears that the sharing of this responsibility between two entities with very different objectives could lead to a clash of economic and environmental interests. “I believe that people’s strongest mistrust lies in this area: they do not believe that the authorities have the capacity to enforce regulations,” says Fernández.
The new law stipulates that a strategic environmental assessment will be conducted according to “sustainability criteria”. But it does not specify what those criteria will be. Farn explains that these types of laws do not usually specify such criteria, as they are generally established during implementation.
At the time of publication, this assessment was yet to be carried out. As such, the farms’ potential locations and which companies may be investing remain unclear.
The FMP’s coordinator, Andrea Michelson, says the organisation is still hoping to stop any salmon farming: “From our point of view, the solution would be not to allow the activity. Our alternatives are always to care for the environment and promote existing activities, such as nature tourism, and other sustainable rural activities that do not involve extraction from the environment.”
For now, salmon farming in Tierra del Fuego is moving forward – by a single vote. The debate is no longer about whether salmon farming is coming, but whether “the end of the world” is prepared for what comes with it.
This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under a Creative Commons licence.
