Opinion | Fish feed, Alternative feeds, Unfed aquaculture
The Paradox of ‘Sustainable’ Carnivorous Finfish Aquaculture: Fish meal, fish oil, and extractive aquaculture’s threat to small scale fishers worldwide
January 6, 2025
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Opinion | Fish feed, Alternative feeds, Unfed aquaculture
January 6, 2025
There is a wealth of information on the role of fish feed in the aquaculture industry and this brief is designed to give the reader an introductory overview and suggestions for further reading.
The growth of fed aquaculture (including carnivorous and herbivorous species) has consistently outpaced that of non-fed species (such as mussels and oysters) in recent decades. With the growth of carnivorous species – such as sea bream, salmon, or seabass dependent on protein – comes an increase in the need for fish feed, small forage fish such as anchoveta, mackerel, herring, whiting and sardines that live in the pelagic zone of oceans or lakes and play a vital role in ecosystems as prey of larger animals.
Small forage fish–such as anchoveta, mackerel, herring, whiting and sardines–that live in the pelagic zone of oceans or lakes provide critical nutrition for vulnerable coastal communities throughout the world. Yet, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that more than 16 million tons of whole fish – or around 20% of all wild fish caught globally – was ground into fish meal or oil in 2020. Of that, more than 75% was used to feed farmed fish with the remainder going into products like pet food, vitamin supplements, and fertilizer.
To quantify aquaculture’s reliance on wild-caught fish, researchers rely on the “Fish In: Fish Out” (FIFO) metric: how much fish goes into the food to produce a certain amount of farmed fish. There are a variety of ways to calculate this metric and recent research suggests that results can differ broadly depending on how the “fish in” side of the equation is defined.
The aquaculture industry and its government and NGO enablers routinely claim that, based on feed conversion ratios (the amount of feed an animal must consume to gain 1 kg of body weight), aquaculture is resource-efficient relative to land-based animals. However, as Jennifer Jacquet, professor of environmental science and policy at University of Miami, has pointed out, this is a false equivalence, and not all feed is equal. Unlike animals like pigs and chicken, carnivorous fish eat mostly other fish, not things like corn or grass. And it takes approximately 6 tons of wild fish (“wet fish”) to produce 1 ton of (dehydrated) fish meal, further skewing the numbers. Thus, the 1.1 kg of feed required by the Atlantic salmon (and sea bream/bass?) to gain 1 kg represents a considerably higher number of actual wild fish.
Globally, the cultivation of carnivorous finfish has led to the depletion of wild fish stocks, particularly in food-insecure regions, where fish that would otherwise provide livelihoods and nutrition are removed from coastal waters to feed farmed fish, driving up the price of wild fish and reducing marine resources in traditional fishing areas. A significant share of fish oil, a key commodity in carnivorous fish farming, is depriving up to 4 million people in Northwest Africa of fish required to meet their annual nutritional needs.
In Norway alone, the annual production of farmed salmon is 27% lower than the volume of wild fish required to produce the fish oil used in its cultivation. Based on analyses of corporate, academic, and government data, a 2024 report published by the NGO Feedback Global reveals that Norwegian salmon farming has an enormous feed footprint, driving the extraction of nearly 2 million tons of whole fish from the wild every year.
This issue has been getting a great deal of attention as those involved in aquaculture, its critics, and those regulating it grapple with the issue of sustainability.
Following the launch of Feedback’s report, the Financial Times published an article tracking the journey of fish extracted from the coastline of West Africa to a Norwegian fish feed factory owned by Mowi, the world’s largest producer of salmon. Factories producing fish meal and fish oil have replicated rapidly along the coastline in West Africa. In Mauritania, one of the countries experiencing this growth, 70% of the fish meal produced is exported to China, and 90% of the fish oil to Europe, where it is used to feed salmon that end up in some of the biggest grocery conglomerates, including Lidl, Aldo, and Sainsbury’s.
Journalists like Ian Urbina at the Outlaw Ocean Project have long written about the issue of ocean grabbing in the production of fish meal. A 2021 investigative report traces the growth of Chinese-backed factories rapidly built to meet the exploding global demand for fish meal and the deadly consequences in regions such as Gunjur, Gambia, where illegally dumped waste containing double the amount of arsenic and forty times the amount of phosphates and nitrates deemed safe turned the wildlife reserve Bolong Fenyo crimson while killing off its fish and other wildlife.
In July 2024, DeSmog, an outlet founded to expose global warming misinformation campaigns, published Revealed: Industry-led West Africa Fishery Protection Measures Marred By ‘Massive Conflicts of Interest’ to uncover the truth behind flagship initiatives ensuring ‘responsible sourcing’ for the global aquafeed industry in West Africa. Later that year, Grain, an NGO working to support small farmers and social movements in their efforts to bring about biodiversity-based food systems, published The Pushback Against Aquaculture Inc. It is a close look into the ways in which groups of small-scale fishers, environmentalists, researchers and scientists around the world are leading the charge on opposition to the fish meal and fish oil sector’s land and ocean grabbing.
In the fall of 2024, Science Advances published a special issue focused on aquaculture. The issue’s lead editor, University of Miami professor Jennifer Jacquet, notes that questions about aquaculture have historically focused on ways to expand its contribution to food systems, leading to optimistic declarations that aquaculture can relieve pressure on wild fish and provide protein to billions of people, or that industry changes have reduced reliance on fishmeal and fish oil. Jacquet and others contributing to the issue offer new ways of envisioning the future of aquaculture, revisiting these long-held beliefs, and scrutinizing systems of accounting for fishmeal and fish oil. Its publication was covered by many outlets, some of which are included below:
Journalists like Ian Urbina and scientists like Jennifer Jacquet are acutely aware of the challenges around tracking the value chain of fish feed through each stage of the production process, from wild-caught fish to the reduction factories where they are turned into fish meal or fish oil, to – ultimately – the aquaculture feedlots, where feed or oil is either consumed or ends up as waste on the sea bed below the farms. FAO describes itself as the only source of global fisheries and aquaculture statistics and its FishStat database covers employment, fleet, production, utilization, trade and consumption, using data collected annually (and voluntarily) from national sources. FAO admits however that coverage and frequency of data collection remain problematic. Fisher and vessel registries are absent in many countries, hampering employment and fleet statistics while small-scale, subsistence, and unregulated fishing are often unaccounted for. Compliance with national and international laws is hard to track at sea, as are landings in foreign ports, which hinder the collection of catch data and trade statistics. These facts, and the use of non-standardized processes and weak capacities for data collection, storage, and analysis result in fragmentation of data across different institutions and limited coordination.
In the absence of national reporting, or in the event of insufficient or inconsistent data, FAO makes estimates based on the best data available from alternative authoritative sources. The scale of this varies, and in 2022 the share of estimated data was 16 percent for production, 6 percent for trade, 48 percent for employment and 44 percent for fleet.
What Urbina, Jacquet, and other investigators must rely on therefore is ground truthing, estimating the location and scale of things like shipping routes, transshipment hubs, and reduction factories using satellite data and Google Earth, or using cameras, ex-employees or whistleblowers in potentially dangerous circumstances to investigate labor practices, analyze licensing agreements, and verify suspicions of illegal or unreported activities. As Dr. Jacquet points out, the effort is worth it as the end goal includes offering up evidence on data that is fundamentally flawed to better inform policy and decision making.
In June of 2024 FAO published The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture. Among its key messages is that all aquatic animal production is expected to increase 10% by 2032 – and 54% of that growth will come from aquaculture. In FAO’s estimation this growth will help meet the rising global demand for aquatic foods but it cautions that the expansion must prioritize sustainability and benefit regions and communities most in need. The report also notes that while small-scale fisheries are a vital source of nutrition and livelihood for millions of people, FAO’s own set of guidelines for securing sustainable small-scale fisheries, endorsed in 2014, have yet to be implemented.
This point was brought home during a convening of small-scale fishers prior to and during FAO’s Committee on Fisheries conference (“COFI36”) in the summer of 2024. There, groups like CAOPA, World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP), and others met to present interventions during the Plenary sessions addressing the role of small-scale fishers in the aquatic food system value chain and the impacts of extractive fishing on their communities, health, and livelihoods.
Four months later in Brazil, WFFP – in solidarity with the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty and other social movements – conducted its 8th General Assembly, a gathering of organizations from 50 countries representing more than 10 million fisher peoples. Those gathered acknowledged a commitment to continued participation in politically legitimate multilateral policy platforms like the FAO and UN Committees on Fisheries and World Food Security. They demanded the implementation of FAO’s Small-Scale Sustainable Fisheries Guidelines as the foundation from which to guide all items being discussed at COFI and through the UN Decade on Family Farming. At the end of the Assembly, they issued a Declaration including the following language:
Industrialized fish and shellfish factories –rebranded as "aquatic foods" or "blue foods"– are falsely promoted as sustainable alternatives to capture fisheries. In reality, their expansion pollutes our waters and bodies with toxic chemicals, intensifies food insecurity, and further marginalizes our peoples, especially impoverished women seafood collectors and gatherers. The expansion of industrial aquaculture, promoted by transnational corporations and our governments, results in escalating violence, with our women bearing the heaviest burden. We are expropriated from our traditional territories, mangroves, and gathering grounds, while facing criminalization, harassment, abuse, and even killings. This systematic displacement under the banner of ’sustainable aquaculture’ destroys our traditional livelihoods and undermines our food sovereignty.
Industrial fishing is closely related to industrial aquaculture, as growing amounts of fish caught by industrial trawlers are processed into feed for aquaculture. This increases pressure on wild capture fisheries, reducing fish abundance and threatening the food sovereignty of traditional fishing communities and the people we feed. We will continue our fight against industrial fishing as this form of extractivism is worsening the global food crisis and exacerbating biodiversity loss and environmental destruction.
Scientists, researchers, citizens groups, foundations, NGOs, and civil society organizations are also weighing in on the paradoxical position that a growing aquaculture sector is, as it likes to proclaim, “feeding the world.” In the spring of 2024, a group of more than 100 individuals and groups convened on the island of Poros, Greece to discuss that country’s plans to expand its aquaculture footprint by 24 times. Researchers presented their findings on the sector and its impacts, and communities from around the world shared legal, movement-building, and other strategies they are employing to confront similar plans. As a collective action, they drafted and submitted a question to the European Parliament asking for clarification around the criteria and review process it uses to measure the sustainability of aquaculture projects and whether the Commission plans to review acceptable practices to ensure the highest level of compliance with agreed-upon environmental and sustainability requirements.
Shortly after, on World Oceans Day while FAO was releasing its latest report on the benefits of the blue revolution, more than 160 organizations signed an open letter addressed to Manuel Barange, FAO’s Assistant Director General, urging that body to remove carnivorous fin fish like sea bass, salmon, and sea bream from its definitions of sustainable aquaculture.
In light of the research and facts being surfaced around the issue of fish feed, it is no surprise that there has been a rush to bring forward proposed alternatives, including high protein plants, such as soybean meal or fermented corn, processed animal proteins (agricultural by-products), microalgae, and oils from plants, yeast, or insects such as Black Soldier Flies. In a series of articles, AquaFeed explores a number of alternatives and how they can support the current context. An article published by the data intelligence company Manolin discusses increasing costs of fish feed brought about by global events such as the Peruvian anchovy crisis and looks at companies and start-ups developing new ingredient alternatives.
While some research indicates that plant proteins are plausible, technically-viable options for aquaculture feed production, there remain unfavorable characteristics that must still be overcome to make them viable for bringing to scale. In addition to identifying potential alternatives, therefore, research is needed to determine which ingredients fish will eat, how they will metabolize feed including at varying developmental stages, and how improvements can be implemented to maximize nutrient utilization and feed use efficiency while minimizing waste and agricultural-based emissions.
The production and large-scale development of aquaculture remains controversial as the world weighs the benefits and risks in using it to help address the issue of feeding a growing global population. Of particular concern is the expanding appetite for wild-caught fish on the part of large multinational aquaculture producers exploiting marine resources beyond their capacity to the detriment of biodiversity, the environment, and the nutrition, food security and livelihoods of communities around the globe, particularly those already under pressure from overfishing and climate change.
By revealing the enormous feed footprint of carnivorous finfish aquaculture and shining a spotlight on a critical part of the supply chain, this brief seeks to highlight the tension and lack of cohesiveness between the message that aquaculture is helping to solve world hunger and the reality of extracting precious resources from the coastal waters of food insecure regions for export to high-income markets.
We hope the reader will use this brief and the Poseidon Project website as a jumping off point for further exploration of the aquaculture industry at large as well as the particular issues related to feed.