Who's behind the latest salmon industry slander?
Opinion: Cecila Millán, director of the Oxfam branch in Chile, appears in her portrait to be a top notch executive, professional and well educated (see http://www.olach.cl/). But in reading her column in Chiloé's primary newspaper La Estrella, initiating the second wave of the campaign, "Sin Miedo Contra el Corriente" ("Fearless, Against the Current"), I was surprised by the lack of objectivity or comprehension regarding the current situation with the nation's salmon industry crisis. Millán is deeply concerned about the welfare of the workers who have lost their jobs and the welfare of these workers' families. She is also deeply concerned that the salmon industry is migrating farther south, and, albeit it will provide employment and opportunity once again for hundreds, that the industry will continue to break labour laws, blatantly exploiting the entire worker population under miserable working conditions. It was that last part of her allegation that made my eyes involuntarily roll. But then again, it's her job isn't it, to really drive the message home with a lot of embellishment and exaggeration. To try to understand more from where she's coming from I visited www.oxfam.org for the first time. I saw lots of noble work being done in parts of the world where people indeed look to be starving and in terribly bad shape. There was no picture anywhere of a well-fed, strong yet disgruntled salmon worker. From an objective standpoint, it made me think that if I was giving money to socially righteous organization like Oxfam International, I'd want them to prioritize their funding money towards something much more noble than this: http://www.contralacorriente.cl/. Ms. Millán, while you dump a hundred thousand dollars or more into a campaign intended to influence a hundred thousand people or less in southern Chile, hundreds of millions continue to suffer much more dearly in Africa or India, where the money at your disposal could be put to a noble use. Meanwhile in Chile the ISA crisis will simply run its course (as it did in other countries), the salmon processing plants and farms will re-open (as they did in other countries), and yes, even the government will catch up to regulating private industry better (as it has in other democratic countries).
