Like anyone who makes a living
from the sea, Arnoldo Raimilla is no
stranger to outside forces. On Chilod
island in southern Chile, some 700 miles
from Santiago, strong winds and storms
often blow over the horizon without
warning. But now, new market-made
hazards are buffeting Raimilla and the
subsistence-level seaweed harvesters he
represents.
Rachel Schurman is a doctoral student
at the University of Wisconsin. Beth
Sheehan worked with the federation of
seaweed-growers unions in 1991.
Wearing a homespun woolen
sweater to protect him from the cold
and black rubber boots to keep his feet
dry, Raimilla walks from his house
along the peninsula that divides the
estuary from the open sea. Now in his
mid-forties, he points toward the
snowcapped Andes across the water,
where as a young man he worked on a
sheep ranch in Argentina for a few
years. Six years ago, he came back to
try to make a living on the 3,088-square
mile island where he was born and
where 120,000 people eke out a living
from the sea and the poor earth.
Turning his back to the mountains,
Raimilla surveys the inlet where tall,
sturdy poles rising from the shallow
waters mark off the freshly harvested
seaweed fields. Raimilla was part of
the great tide of islanders and outsiders
who rushed to supply a new demand for
ChiloC’s seaweed and shellfish. New-
comers worked alongside island farm-
ers who cultivated potatoes in the tradi-
tion of their forebears. That was four
years ago. “But now,” he says, raising
his voice over the near-deafening noise
of the torrential rains so common in
Chiloy, “the only thing we can live by
is seaweed. Potatoes aren’t worth grow-
ing for the market because of the high
cost of fertilizer, and everyday we have
to go farther to find shellfish and fish.”
The high price of fertilizer and the
depletion of marine resources are part
and parcel of the economic model that
has generated rapid growth (over 5% a
year) in Chile since 1984, faster than
any other country in Latin America.
Following the recommendations of its
Chicago-trained economic advisers, the
Pinochet government devalued the peso
(making Chilean goods cheaper
abroad), streamlined the export pro-
cess, and provided institutional sup-
port to would-be exporters. Spurred on
by these and other measures, Chilean
entrepreneurs began exporting what
their country had to offer: fruit, fish,
wood and minerals for markets as far-
away as Japan, Taiwan and Spain.
Arnoldo Raimilla and his fellow
“Chilotes” have experienced more rapid
and radical changes in the past six years
than their ancestors did over the pre-
ceding four hundred. They are prob-
ably better off in material terms than
before the recent export boom. But the
economic strategy that brought short-
term prosperity has had social and en-
vironmental consequences that threaten
to make islanders more vulnerable in
the long run.
Winds of Change
For centuries, Chilotes lived on tiny
farms (minifundios), generally too small
to support an entire family. Islanders
farmed potatoes, raised sheep and cows,
and fished. They used the island’s red-
wood trees to build their houses, its
cypress to construct their small fishing
boats, and other hardwoods to fuel their
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
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3ti;Srr ‘` c I
YIF ‘wood stoves during the long winters.
To provide the family with cash in-
come, a husband or son would often
work on a sheep ranch in Patagonia,
leaving the women to run the farm as
well as the household. In those days,
Chilod’s pristine bays, abundant ma-
rine life and expansive hardwood for-
ests did not attract attention from out-
siders.
After the 1973 coup, as part of its
free-market economic program which
struck down trade barriers and pro-
moted private business as the motor for
economic growth, the military govern-
ment curtailed credit and technical as-
sistance to small-scale farmers. Instead,
it supported medium and large-scale
agribusiness which exported products
such as grapes and berries to the United
States and Europe.
Although the Chilotes had never
produced much for the market, they felt
the impact of Pinochet’s policies. The
rising cost of fertilizer and credit drove
islanders to produce less and sink deeper
into debt. Between the early 1970s and
mid- 1980s, the numberof acres planted
with potatoes in Chilo6 fell more than
50 percent. Chilote farms were simply
too small and their production methods
too antiquated to survive in the increas-
ingly competitive environment.
The unleashing of market forces also
turned the island’s marine wealth into
valuable commodities. In the late 1970s,
Mack trucks began arriving from
Santiago daily to load up with fresh
fish, shellfish, and seaweed to supply
new export markets. According to
Chile’s National Fishing Service, the
number of processing plants grew from
two in 1976 to 21 a decade later, and to
38 by 1989. Between 1976 and 1985,
the seafood extracted in and around
Chilo- more than tripled from 36,000 to
almost 129,000 tons.
Rather than continuing the tradition
of subsistence agriculture or migrating
off the island to look for work, the sons
of Chilote farmers turned toward the
sea. Many became full-time divers and
fishermen, while their sisters left the
family farms to work as laborers in new
fish-processing plants, canneries and
salmon farms, or as maids in the rapidly
growing port towns. Fishermen sup-
plying the processing plants also began
to earn a good, steady income for the
first time in years. Diving for shellfish,
particularly abalone, became so profit-
able that a good diver could earn $1,500
in two months-a year’s salary for an
island teacher.
But in Chilo’s subsistence econo-
my, where money and its management
were never an important part of daily
life, few Chilotes invested their new
income. Much of their earnings went to
liquor, prostitutes, and name-brand blue
jeans and sneakers. Another popular
item was color T.V.s-and the car bat-
teries needed to run them. The divers
and fishermen weren’t alone in failing
to invest in the island’s development.
Because the government did not com-
pel businesses to reinvest any of their
income, nor tax them for their resource
use, little of the fish industry’s profit
stayed in Chilod. “The only thing that
the fishing industry has brought to
Chilod is demand for unskilled labor,”
a rural development expert commented
wryly. “Everything else they’ve taken
out: natural resources and the tax rebate
for employing Chilotes. What they will
leave when they go will be a few tin
warehouses which aren’t even good
enough to use as schools.”
According to a study done by
Agraria, a national research institute,
the value of natural resources extracted
from the island equaled $27 million in
1987. That same year, public invest-
ment amounted to $1.5 million. The
150-mile road, started 30 years ago,
that runs the length of the island is still
not completely paved. Most families
don’t have running water or electricity,
and a high-school education for their
children remains a luxury.
Natural Resources Depleted
Chile’s export boom has taken a
serious toll on the island’s natural re-
source base. The case of Chilean
abalone-“locos” in the local vernacu-
lar-provides a telling example of what
happened when Chilo6’s marine re-
sources suddenly took on commercial
value.
Before 1980, islanders claim, it was
impossible to wade into the water with-
out stepping on these large, grayish
shellfish. Known for their savory meat,
locos are well worth the time it takes to
prepare them: first they must be beaten
with a wooden stick to make them ten-
der, and then boiled for a couple of
hours. Until recently, this beloved and
famous plate was affordable to all but
the poorest Chileans.
When the Japanese discovered that
the loco could substitute for its increas-
ingly scarce abalone-and were will-
ing to pay Japanese prices for it-they
set off a reaction that no one ever imag-
ined. In 1978, boats from the north
began arriving by the fleet. Anyone
who could don a wetsuit went diving.
“It wasn’t abalone I saw when I dove
turned to gold, and in a modern reincar-
nation of the California gold rush, na-
tional investors, foreign companies, and
under- and unemployed Chileans
flocked to this once-isolated island.
“We came to Chiloi in 1986,” says
Maria Angelica, “because my father
couldn’t find work in Santiago. One
day a relative wrote saying things were
good here and you could make a lot of
money in pelillo. So we packed up and
came.”
From 1980 to 1985, the extraction
of pelillo tripled, as islanders and mi-
grants began spending more time waist-
deep in the ice-cold water gathering the
plant. Within a few years, the principal
natural beds were stripped bare. “They
came for the brown gold, pulled every-
thing up from the roots, and now we are
left with nothing,” complained the presi-
dent of one of Chilod’s new seaweed
growers organizations.
Fortunately, as natural pelillo banks
began to diminish, researchers at Chile’s
Fisheries Development Institute (IFOP)
found a way to grow it. Pelillo is now
cultivated in a variety of ways, depend-
ing on location and a grower’s financial
resources. Most larger growers have
fully equipped diving teams that plant
and harvest their seaweed crop under-
water. Medium-sized growers gener-
ally harvest their seaweed by raking it
for locos,” one Chilote recalled nostal-
gically. “It was dollars.”
Dozens of entrepreneurs, mainly
from Santiago, set up processing plants
in whatever building they could find.
Overnight, the islanders awoke to find
themselves competing with national
investors and foreign consumers for the
rights to the island’s natural bounty.
Before long most nearby loco banks
were wiped out. Some firms became so
desperate they hired $500-a-day heli-
copters to fly in and buy locos from
divers in remote areas. When the loco
stock reached a critically low level in
1989, the Pinochet government was
forced to give up its anti-regulation
posture and impose a three-year ban on
loco harvesting.
The pattern repeated itself with the
seaweed, pelillo (gracilaria). This long
stringy brown plant grows in protected
coves, bays and backwaters upand down
the coast of Chile. It takes root in the
sandy ocean floor, and with the right
amount of sunlight and nitrogen, grows
as fast as field grass. Wild pelillo used
to be so abundant in Chilo6 that island-
ers used it to fertilize their potato fields.
As Chile’s international trade picked
up, however, some clever soul recog-
nized the seaweed as the very same
stuff used to make agar-agar, a com-
mon food preservative. The brown
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1 onto small boats with long-necked pitchforks. And the smallest and poor- est growers, including most islanders, plant and harvest each row by hand, awaiting the full moon and low tides when they can wade out into the shal- low water. Because of its low capital require- ments, pelillo cultivation is an impor- tant economic alternative for islanders and migrants alike. But the shift to
cultivation created its own set of prob-
lems, most significantly the tensions
that have arisen from the establishment
and allocation of water rights. In order
to cultivate pelillo, one must petition
for a “concession,” or the exclusive
right to use a specific area of the beach.
Consistent with the laissez-faire prin-
ciples of its economic model, the gov-
ernment granted concessions on a first-
come, first-serve basis, with no special
consideration given to the people whose
land abuts the shore. Outsiders and
some Chilotes snapped up the best con-
cessions before the rest of the popula-
tion knew what hit them.
Islanders Unionize
Determined to get in on the conces-
sion mania before there was nothing
left to give out, islanders formed 54
seaweed growers organizations, called
sindicatos. Arnoldo Raimilla and 25
families organized one called Los
Arrayanes (the name of a common lo-
cal tree). In 1987, 19 of the unions
founded the Provincial Federation of
Seaweed Cultivators and Collectors.
Member unions gather once a month
in the main port town of Ancud to
discuss federation matters, except dur-
ing the harvest when they meet at the
beach and compete for buyers. Last
May, the federation voted unanimously
to establish a marketing cooperative to
sell their seaweed. “The organization
of the future will be the cooperative,”
wrote new Federation President Juan
Aedo. “The outcome of this vote repre-
sents the most sustained expression of
solidarity in Chilod, continuing the co-
operative tradition of the Huilliche
minga.” (The Huilliche is one of the
indigenous populations that lived on
the island for centuries; the minga is a
traditional form of collective work.)
Out of their small second-floor of-
fice equipped with an old manual type-writer, two desks, a phone and a kero-
sene heater, the federation is waging a
cooperative education campaign to en-
sure full membership participation. It is
training union members to analyze their
costs, evaluate their production and
monitor market prices. And through
weekend workshops, radio programs
and regional meetings, it is laying the
groundwork for the transition from in-
dividual to cooperative marketing.
The federation is also taking up the
battle over resource access. In a local
radio interview during Chile’s “Month
of the Sea,” Aedo discussed the impor-
tance of giving Chilote communities
priority in the future allocation of con-
cessions. More controversially, the fed-
eration is asking for the reallocation of
areas already concessioned but not in
use. The federation has attempted to
woo more buyers to the island and to
establish purchasing agreements that
will insure a stable, fair price for its
members. And it is setting up a fund so
that sindicatos can keep their seaweed
off the market when prices are low.
It’s too soon to tell whether or not
these organizational initiatives will al-
low Chilotes to defend themselves
against the new economic forces that
international market integration has
brought. Right now, prospects for the
federation and its member unions look
decidedly dim. After a dramatic fall in
seaweed prices last May when the larg-
est buyer in Chilo6, Algas Marinas,
declared a moratorium on purchases,
some unions opted to sit on hundreds of
pounds of wet seaweed they had har-
vested rather than sell at half of last
year’s price. Making the future appear
even more unstable, a new synthetic
substitute for agar-agar, developed by
the San Diego-based Kelco division of
the Merck company, has received lim-
ited approval from the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration. If this substitute
turns out to be cheaper than cultivated
seaweed, Chilo6 growers may find they
have lost their market permanently.
Seaweed-grower Arnoldo Raimilla
now spends a good part of the week
away from home, looking for work in
the port town or on a fishing boat head-
ing south in search of shellfish. While
he and many others have learned that
the benefits of international trade can
be great, the risks may be bigger than
they can afford to take.
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