Chile is the world's second largest exporter of salmon and the largest supplier in the United States. In the southern part of the country, the controversy continues on a large number of salmon farms allegedly located in protected areas.

Puerto Montt, more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) south of the Chilean capital, Santiago, is the core of the country's Atlantic salmon industry.

In a processing facility in a suburb of town workers wearing white suits, hair nets, face masks, and blue plastic gloves and boots, prepare fresh smoked salmon for export to the United States and Japan.

In the spacious conference room, the chief company officer of the factory owner Fracisco Lobos - Salmon - Exobio X- explains how fish have changed southern Chile.

“Salmon has always been part of the industrial revolution in the region,” he said. “There used to be a lot of poverty in the region, and many people now earn more than the rest of Chile.

“As a result of the industry, many support services have increased significantly, which has benefited families living here, and people have moved here to work from other parts of the country.”

Atlantic salmon is not native to Chile. Instead, eggs were brought from England to Chile in the late 19th century and were released into rivers, lakes and seas, growing into fish for recreational fishing.

Fish that began to cultivate fish in the 1970s, and then began to grow in large quantities since the 1970s. At the end of last year, there were 1,343 active salmon farms in southern Chile.

Chile exported 782,076 tons of salmon and trout in 2024, according to the latest annual data from the Chilean National Customs Service. The vast majority of them are salmon, but the two fish are calculated together in official data.

That's worth $6.4 billion (£4.8 billion), making it Chile's third largest export after copper and fresh fruit. This also means that Chile's salmon exports only exceed Norway's exports.

According to trade agency Salmón Chile, about 86,000 people now work directly or indirectly for Chile’s farmed salmon industry. The farm extends from the Biobío region about 500 kilometers south of Santiago to the Magallanes region in the far south of Patagonia, more than 2,000 kilometers from the capital.

Global demand for farmed salmon has grown by 40% by 2033, and Chilean producers are keen to increase their production, a report said. However, it actually dropped a bit last year.

Salmón Chilean president Arturo Clements said the government needs to do more to help the industry expand.

“For us, it’s very difficult to grow because we have too many regulations and we have too many conflicts at sea,” he said. “We need to define a long-term strategy on salmon cultivation.”

Many conflicts involve the location of many fish farms, which critics say are highly contaminated.

More specifically, there are 408 salmon farming concessions - a government-granted license that allows companies to operate a salmon farm in specific areas within Chile's environmentally protected areas.

These include 294 of the 294 national reserves, allowing limited commercial use of natural resources. 29 In tighter controlled national parks, business operations should not be formally allowed.

Flavia Liberona is the Executive Director of Terram, a foundation for promoting sustainable development. In an ancient building in downtown Santiago, she describes part of her in her hot office - Salvemos la Patagonia or Save Patagonia.

It hopes to protect natural habitats throughout Chile’s Patagonia region. This vast geographical area starts from Puerto Montt, Puerto Rico, and then extends to the country's base. This is where most salmon farms are located.

"We want the salmon farm to stop operating in national parks and in national reserves," Ms Liberona said.

“Salmon farming causes various environmental problems. One is keeping the fish in a cage and feeding pellets.

“Many particles and fish feces end up falling on the seabed, which results in less oxygen, killing the marine life under the cage and depending on the current elsewhere in the ocean.”

When these concerns came from Chile’s Salman Clement, he explained that the categories of salmon farming concessions were different.

“We have 21 kinds of things that we don’t use in terms of the offer in the national park,” he said. “We have told the government that we don’t want to be there and ask for relocation, but nothing happened in years.”

Regarding salmon farming in the national reserve, he said it was a different environment and they could operate under Chilean law and the rules and regulations they followed.

In Chile, the salmon industry is regulated by secrets in fisheries and aquaculture, which is part of the public body of the Ministry of Economics, Development and Tourism.

It focuses on environmental protection and sustainability and is developing new general aquaculture laws to further regulate the industry.

Julio Salas Gutiérrez, secretary general of Chile's Fisheries and Aquaculture, told the BBC that the government is working to remove fish farms from national parks.

"Accounting that the government has not done anything for years' relocation of concessions outside the national parks," he said. "In the current government, it is not only an effort to understand the problem, but also to understand the problem.

“The relocation process itself is often very complex, bureaucratic, and requires a large number of years given the difficulty of relocating these concessions to new areas suitable for aquaculture.”

Matt Craze is the founder of the UK and Chile-based spherical research, studying the global seafood market. He said Chile's salmon industry would invest more money: "If they think there is a better regulatory framework and the government has some certainty about the areas they can farm".

However, with the general election to be held in Chile later this year, uncertainty may continue in the near term, at least in the near term.