Salmon for $5/lb.? Something's fishy about big-box retailers.

If you were so inclined, you couldn't mail a pound of salmon back to Chile for $4.84. ... What exactly did Wal-Mart have to do to get salmon [from Chile] so cheaply? ... they ... don't want to have to explain dramatic, unsettling revelations about how the familiar products they sell manage to have such low prices. ...

"Have you ever seen a hog farm?" asks Gerry Leape, vice president of marine conservation for the National Environmental Trust, a Washington-based environmental nonprofit group. "These fish are the hogs of the sea. They live in the same sort of conditions, it's just in water. They pack them really closely together, they use a lot of prophylactic antibiotics, not to treat disease, but to prevent it. There's lots of concentrated fish waste, it creates dead zones in the ocean around the pens. ... People say, oh, that's natural, all fish go poo in the ocean. But not in that kind of concentration. It just smothers the seabed." ...

[But] in southern Chile, says Pizarro, the impact on the daily lives of the local people comes not so much from the pens of fish as from the processing plants built to prepare them for export.  ... the processing plants suffer by most accounts from the kinds of sweatshop issues more commonly associated with garment factories in developing nations. ...

Part of the reason Wal-Mart can sell a salmon fillet for $4.84 is that, as Leape puts it, "they don't internalize all the costs." Pollution ultimately costs money -- to clean up, to prevent, to recover from. But right now those costs aren't in the price of a pound of Chilean salmon. Salmon-processing facilities that are run with as much respect for the people as the hygiene of the fish also cost money -- for reasonable wages, for proper equipment, for enough workers to permit breaks and days off. Right now those costs aren't in the price of a pound of Chilean salmon either.