QUEULE, Chile — One beautiful morning in late spring, the ocean’s bounty had been especially plentiful, yet Luis Baez was in a foul mood.

At dawn, dozens of fishing boats under his stewardship returned from a midnight outing, heavy with silvery-grey fish called southern rays bream. With clear skies forecast for days ahead, crews might have readied for another trip, but with southern rays selling for just 75 cents per kilo, another excursion wasn’t worth the trouble.

“The majority of these boats aren’t even registered to catch southern rays,” explained Baez, who is president of the Queule artisan fishermen’s cooperative, a small village on Chile’s central coast. “But the government has to bite its tongue or this becomes a social issue, and all these men take to the streets.”

Last year, frustrations spilled into the streets as artisan fisherman burned tires and blocked roads in opposition to a congressional debate over a new fisheries law, which they saw as tantamount to privatizing the country’s most profitable fisheries for the benefit of few powerful business interests. Undeterred by the outraged fishermen, legislators forged ahead and approved the law in December, making notable improvements in fisheries management — including a ban on the destructive practice of bottom trawling, or clear-cutting, vulnerable marine ecosystems.

Critics fear the new law, which took effect in February, will negatively impact artisan fishermen by exacerbating longstanding issues within the industry, including the continuation of a divisive quota system through which corporations could feasibly hold sway over independent fishermen in perpetuity. At stake is a share of the world’s seventh-largest export market of fish products.

Lawmakers awarded 20-year renewable contracts to a small group of companies for the largest share of Chile’s main fisheries, which center-left Senator Ximena Rincon described as expropriating citizen sovereignty over the country’s fish and handing it to corporations.

“It isn’t legitimate to say to all Chileans. The only ones who can fish in Chile are three companies that live by fishing and taking advantage of resources of all Chileans for decades,” said Rincon, one of 11 senators whose attempt to stall the bill died in constitutional court.

The fisheries law could set the tone for future discussion on resource management, as similarly far-reaching contracts on natural resources have met with public outrage, notably on water distribution and lithium mining contracts.

In practical terms, however, the law has preserved a legacy whose roots can be traced to the early 1990s when Chile’s fisheries operated under a Total Allowable Catch system that promoted growth over sustainability.

This period, dubbed the “Olympic Race,” characterized by rapidly expanding commercial fleets out to capture as many fish as possible, was a conservation nightmare that could not last. By 2001, Congress passed an Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ) system, designed to reign in overfishing.

Under the ITQ system, all commercial fishermen were assigned a percentage of the allowable catch per year, but the system favored large-scale fishing operations, awarding them the majority of lucrative fisheries over artisan fishermen.

For the next decade, larger companies absorbed smaller ones, consolidating more than 90 percent of jack mackerel and a majority share of hake, into the hands of four conglomerates: Marfood, Orizon, Blumar and Camanchaca.

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