The hidden cost of farmed fish: Pollution, forced labor and the depletion of wild fish As of 2022, more than half of the seafood eaten worldwide was farm-raised rather than caught at sea, a fact that has been praised as evidence that fish farming can meet a growing demand for seafood while slowing the collapse of the oceans. But the unbridled embrace of aquaculture as a sustainable answer to feeding the planet ignores some very real costs. The most popular types of farmed seafood — salmon, shrimp, trout, seabass, seabream — are fed “fishmeal,” a protein-rich powder or pellet made from the kinds of wild fish that aquaculture is thought to save. In fact, fishmeal is fed to two-thirds of global farmed fish. Before they reach market, some farm-raised salmon eat more than six times their weight in wild-caught fish. With thousands of fish farms worldwide, aquaculture provides millions of people with year-round access to affordable protein. Fish farming is also a crucial source of jobs, especially for women in India. But a wide-reaching investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit news organization based in Washington, D.C., has found that the aquaculture industry’s answer to worries about the world’s oceans — “grow more fish so we can catch less” — is often making the very problem it hoped to solve worse and harming the people it was meant to help. A worker drives a tractor past mounds of dried and crushed menhaden fish, to be used as animal feed supplements, at the Omega Protein processing plant in Reedville, Va., in 2015. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images) The investigation The business of fishmeal — often out of public view — can involve using forced labor, poisoning communities, and eradicating the livelihoods of local fishermen. Fishmeal production has led to chronic chemical exposure, violent protests — typically spurred by the stench from fishmeal factories — and escalating transnational tensions as countries compete for catch. That price is paid primarily by the poorer countries where the main ingredient of fishmeal is harvested and processed. The Outlaw Ocean Project mapped roughly the entire global fishmeal industry, including more than 1,400 fishmeal factories across 64 countries. The effort involved dozens of journalists from over 15 countries who visited factories and farms and boarded fishmeal ships at sea. Using certification documents, ownership records, trade data, audits and government lists of licensed fishing ships, the reporting team was able to connect ships to the plants they supplied and pin down which species were being targeted for fishmeal. This allowed them to determine which fishmeal plants were connected to ships engaged in illegal or unsustainable fishing. Then, they traced the fishmeal to the fish farm and to where the seafood was sold by retailers. The investigation found that more than 2,400 ships tied to fishmeal production, operating in the waters of at least 30 countries. It found that most of those ships do not fully comply with the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency, a guide created by leading ocean-focused civil society groups detailing accountability standards for industrial fishing fleets. For example, less than 30% of the fleets had publicly available location information, and less than 25% had a unique vessel identification number. Such opacity makes the ships difficult to police. Workers sort rainbow trout by weight at a fish processing plant in Murmansk, Russia, in 2019. (Andrey Rudakov / Bloomberg via Getty Images) At least half of the species landed by the assessed fishmeal vessels are classified by scientific studies as “overexploited” or worse. Most of these vessels are purse seiners or trawlers, which deploy vast nets to capture dense schools of fish. Both gear types are associated with high levels of waste, routinely hauling in large volumes of non-target species. At least 165 of the ships were bottom trawlers, a particularly destructive form of fishing that uses weighted nets that scrape the ocean floor, destroying virtually everything in their path. Concerns about aquaculture extend far beyond the fate of the oceans. In Gambia and Mauritania in western Africa, the industry drives food insecurity as fish that once sustained local communities are diverted into fishmeal factories. In remote islands in Russia’s far east and in China’s Xinjiang region, the reporting detailed the use of forced labor on ships, farms and in factories. In other countries, including India and Peru, this industry was tied to at least 80 incidents of civil unrest, some violent, usually in the form of labor strikes and protests sparked by the water pollution or the stink from factories cooking tons of decomposing fish. Anchovies are harvested about 5 miles off the coast of Peru’s Lima province on Nov. 19, 2023. Peru is a leading producer of fishmeal and fish oil. (Ernesto Benavides / AFP via Getty Images) In Chile in 2024, several hundred demonstrators burned tires and blocked coastal highways and railway tracks to protest the early closure of the fishing season, a move partly driven by overfishing tied to fishmeal. In Senegal, fishmeal has put local fishers out of work, so they increasingly are selling — or repurposing — their boats to ferry migrants to Spain’s Canary Islands, a stepping stone to Europe. This perilous journey of roughly 930 miles claimed more than 3,000 lives in 2025. “We’re fishermen, but there’s no fish left here, so we left,” said Cheikhou Omar, a 21-year-old fisherman in 2024 as he sat on a beach in Senegal, rescued after the fishing boat he tried to sail to Spain capsized, killing 30. The fishmeal industry also contributes to transnational tensions. For example, in 2021, a dozen Turkish bottom trawlers fishing illegally in the Aegean Sea tried to ram a Greek research vessel when the scientists began filming their activity. In 2018, riots broke out in Saint-Louis, Senegal, after a fisher was shot and killed by Mauritanian coast guards, during what the Mauritanians said was a cross-border raid by a fishmeal boat. The politics of protein In her 2021 book “The Fishmeal Revolution,” Kristin A. Wintersteen traces how the Humboldt Current — a cold, nutrient-rich upwelling system along the Pacific coast of South America — was reimagined as a protein mine. That shift, she argues, turned Peru into a fishmeal superpower, responsible for roughly a quarter of worldwide production. Fishmeal helped fuel the post-World War II expansion of industrial chicken and hog farming, particularly in Europe and the United States. Since then, this model has spread worldwide. Crew members work on an anchovy boat about 5 miles off the coast of the Peru’s Lima province on Nov. 19, 2023. (Ernesto Benavides / AFP via Getty Images) The feed industry has emphasized that it is decreasing its reliance on fishmeal and fish oil — and especially the use of whole fish or fish parts that can be eaten by people. However, as aquaculture grows, global fishmeal production is predicted to rise by nearly 10% by 2032, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations agency. For example, five of the world’s largest salmon companies increased their use of fishmeal and fish oil made from whole wild fish by as much as 39% between 2020 and 2024, according to a report from the Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return Initiative. Asked about sustainability concerns tied to her industry, Véronique Jamin, a spokesperson for IFFO, the international fishmeal association, said that fish farming is “the most efficient animal protein system.” She added that her organization’s “role is not to advise which markets should use fishmeal and fish oil.” Attempts to make the industry more sustainable must consider market forces, she said, and seafood companies have to respond to “what people actually want to buy and eat.” Efforts to move away from fishmeal and fish oil have struggled. Researchers have identified potential alternatives — including seaweed, cassava waste, single-cell proteins produced by fungi and even sewage. But none are being produced affordably at scale, and the alternatives often lack the nutrients that support the growth of farmed fish. The role of forced labor For those toiling at fishmeal plants and fish farms, the work and conditions can be brutal, the investigation found. In Russia, fish processing workers were held captive in secluded company towns or stuck on ships far from shore. “People have nowhere to go, no money,” one worker told President Vladimir Putin, who participated in a call-in television show about the fishmeal plant in 2016. A second worker pleaded: “Please, help us.” In China, the aquaculture industry is expanding rapidly in the country’s mountainous and desert areas inland, particularly in Tibet and Xinjiang, two areas known for political repression, with criminal penalties for speaking native languages or practicing religious or cultural traditions. Because th... Source: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-10-09/fish-farming