The first time Carlos Vega saw white Japanese oyster flesh, he was surprised. He had only seen it in a shade of green. It was then that he realized that the seafood he harvested along the coast of Ventanas in central Chile was contaminated.
Carlos and his fishing colleagues sold oysters on the beaches of Ventanas to wealthy tourists who spent summers there. Raw with lemon! Delicious oysters!
They began cultivating oysters in 1996. But four years later, the National Health Service closed their operation down after a massive episode of poisoning that the service attributed to contamination by heavy metals. A stigma fell on Ventanas. The million-dollar investment in materials, labor and time that the fishermen had made with the help of a German NGO was suddenly lost.
It was the first time we fishermen realized what was happening, Carlos told Mongabay Latam, looking at the industrial park by the sea. The park was home to four coal-fired power plants, a copper smelter and refinery, an oil refinery, a cement company, and five storage tanks for liquefied natural gas, among other installations. And it had brought them misery.
In 2000, the National Health Service banned the commerce of green Japanese oysters and other marine resources from Ventanas because of contamination from heavy metals and fecal coliforms.
It was a dark and very sad time, Carlos said, his voice almost breaking. The investment and their hard work over the years was reduced to nothing. We still had the management area, but who was going to buy from us? We experienced the greatest misery.
The marine conservation organization Oceana and a laboratory run by Fundación Chile, which tested clams, limpets, abalone and crabs from the region, found that all the species were contaminated with copper, arsenic and cadmium. The highest rates of contamination were found among the abalone from the management area of Ventanas, with five times more copper and four times more arsenic content than Chilean regulations allow, and five times more cadmium than what European standards allow. The crabs had four times more copper and arsenic than Chile allows.
2019 Copyright Conservation news