OUTLAW OCEAN PROJECT: The price paid beyond the plate — the huge costs of farmed seafood

In January 2026, the then fisheries minister, Willie Aucamp, travelled to Saint Helena Bay off South Africa’s West Coast to attend the ribbon cutting of a new factory run by Pioneer Fishing. The plant would process fishmeal, an ingredient made by cooking and pulverising wild-caught fish. Aucamp said the investment represented South Africa’s commitment to the “sustainable utilisation of our marine living resources” because the plant would target herring, whose stocks were healthier than those of the sardines and anchovies that typically went into South African fishmeal. He ended his speech on an optimistic note: “May this processing plant stand as a symbol of confidence not only on the West Coast, but in South Africa, in our regulatory institutions, and in the long-term future of the small pelagic fishery.”

The fishmeal produced at this factory would be exported, earning foreign revenue for the area. South Africa exported $85-million worth of fishmeal in 2025, most of which was fed to fish farms in Denmark, Spain, Greece, China and Germany. Pioneer Fishing now produces about a fourth of all South Africa’s fishmeal and fish oil exports, “by utilising responsible fishing strategies that harvest ocean resources without compromising the sustainability of the reserves”, according to its website.

But critics worldwide have questioned whether the practice of catching and reducing whole, fresh fish to grow more seafood can ever be considered sustainable. The most popular types of farmed seafood – salmon, shrimp, trout, sea bass and sea bream – are fed the kinds of wild fish that aquaculture claims to be saving, thereby accelerating ocean depletion, not slowing it. Two-thirds of global aquaculture grows species that are fed fishmeal and fish oil. Before it reaches the market, a farmed salmon, for instance, eats at some farms more than six times its weight in wild-caught fish.

The concerns about aquaculture extend far beyond the fate of the oceans. The feed that powers most of this industry comes with a huge variety of other hidden costs, according to a wide-reaching investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project, a news organisation based in Washington, DC. These costs include the loss of artisanal fishing jobs, chronic chemical exposure, avoidable worker deaths, violent protests typically spurred by the horrid stench from fishmeal factories, and escalating geopolitical tensions as countries compete for scarce sources of protein. These social and environmental impacts exact a price primarily paid by the poorer countries where the feed ingredient is harvested and processed, far from where the resulting luxury seafood is eaten.

The Exalmar-operated Maria Mercedes sank on May 3, 2024, off the coast of Barranca Province. Fishing is ranked as the world’s most dangerous profession. (Credit: @RadarPesquero on Facebook)

In Gambia and Mauritania, the investigation documented how the industry drives food insecurity as fish that once sustained local communities are increasingly being diverted into fishmeal factories for export. In remote islands in Russia’s far east and in China’s Xinjiang region, the reporting detailed the use of forced labour on ships, at farms and in factories.

In other countries, including India and Peru, this industry was tied to at least 80 incidents of civil unrest, some of them violent, usually in the form of labour strikes and community protests sparked by the water pollution or stench from factories cooking thousands of tonnes of decomposing fish, according to Bait to Plate, an online tool that tracks the fishing and seafood industries.

From 2023 to 2024, workers across Peru’s industrial fishing sector staged protests over wages and unpaid overtime at fishmeal plants owned by companies including Exalmar, TASA and CFG Investment. (Credit: Prensa Chalaca)

In Kayar, Senegal, demonstrators marched in protest of the Barna Senegal fishmeal factory on August 20, 2022. Locals said the facility’s toxic smells and waste made them sick and polluted the water. (Credit: Seringe Mbaye on Facebook)

In Senegal, fishmeal has put local fishers out of work, so increasingly they are selling – or repurposing – their boats to flee to Europe, typically taking the roughly 1,500km sea journey to Spain’s Canary Islands, a route that claimed more than 3,000 lives in 2025.

Toxic sludge from fishmeal factories along Peru’s coastline accumulates on the seafloor. (Credit: CGTN America)

“We’re fishermen, but there’s no fish left here, so we left,” said Cheikhou Omar, a 21-year-old fisher, in September 2024 as he sat on a beach in Senegal, rescued after the fishing boat he took trying to get to Spain capsized, killing 30.

The four-year investigation mapped roughly the entire global fishmeal industry, including more than 1,400 fishmeal factories across 64 countries, tracing supply chains from fishing vessels to processing plants, feed mills, fish farms and seafood retailers. The reporting effort involved dozens of journalists from as many countries, visiting factories and farms and boarding fishmeal ships at sea. The goal was to chronicle what economists call this industry’s “externalities” – the hidden and displaced social costs of producing this feed that rarely appear on the balance sheets of the seafood companies that depend on it.

Workers recover the body of a fisher who died when the Jehovah is the Light of the World III sank near Morro Sama, Peru, on July 2, 2024. (Credit: Radio Uno)

The investigation revealed that the fishmeal industry also contributes to geopolitical 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 the Mauritanian Coast Guard shot and killed a fisher during what the Mauritanians said was a cross-border raid by a fishmeal boat. Since the mid-1970s, Morocco has militarily occupied Western Sahara, a presence that more than 10 EU Court of Justice rulings and various UN resolutions have deemed illegal.

Dead fish strewn along the roadway in Nouadhibou, Mauritania, on 28 November 2024. The stench, water and air pollution and overfishing caused by this industry raise especially acute worries for a country that is already among Africa’s poorest. (Credit: Zakia)

Still, Moroccan ships routinely fish in Western Saharan waters, turning their illegal catch into fishmeal in Western Saharan plants, then exporting it to farms globally labelled as Moroccan. A violent clash over trucks, many of them carrying this fish and fishmeal out of Western Sahara, led to the collapse of a 29-year ceasefire between the countries in 2020.

The oceans bear an especially heavy and largely invisible burden of the fishmeal and fish oil industry. More than a fifth of wild-caught fish around the world is used for non-human consumption, especially as feed for fish, but also chickens and pigs. The investigation assessed more than 2,400 ships tied to fishmeal production, operating in the waters of at least 30 countries. It found that most of these 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 fleet had publicly available location information, and under 25% had a unique vessel identification number, or ship licence plate. Such opacity makes the fleet difficult to police.

A day among Kayar’s artisanal fishers and processors reveals the rhythms and strains of their traditional way of life. Residents rely on small-scale fishing for food and income, but distant-water fleets and fishmeal factories are depleting stocks and diverting catch from local markets, threatening their livelihoods. (Credit: The Outlaw Ocean Project)

Scientific studies classified at least half of the species landed by the assessed fishmeal vessels as “overexploited” or worse. Most of the ships in this fleet 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 bycatch and non-target species. At least 165 of the ships in the global fishmeal fleet were bottom trawlers, conducting a particularly destructive form of fishing that uses weighted nets that scrape the ocean floor, destroying virtually everything in their paths. The problem of unsustainable fishing is compounded by heavy government subsidies that keep too many vessels operating, accelerating pressure on already stressed fisheries.

A truck from Touba Protéine Marine (formerly Barna Senegal) dumps waste into a lake in Kayar. This video was evidence in a court case brought by the local community against Touba, alleging illegal dumping. (Credit: Greenpeace)

“Any accounting of the true impact of aquaculture has to start not with the farm, but with the feed,” said Daniel Pauly, project director of the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia. “And that kind of accounting offers a very different picture than the industry offers.”

A tangled food web

For most of human history, we ate what ecosystems produced on their own: wild fish, grazing animals, and crops grown for people. Livestock survived largely on grass and agricultural leftovers that humans didn’t eat. Today, we do something different: We grow or catch food that people could eat and feed it to animals instead, especially in industrial livestock and fish farming. These calories are converted before they’re consumed.

This global transformation has rewired the trophic chain, turning farms and oceans into engineered calorie-processing systems. The natural food web, consisting of who eats what and how energy moves from plants to animals to humans, is no longer mainly determined by ecosystems. It’s now shaped by industrial design. Animals have become less like savings accounts that turn waste into food, and more like biological factories fuelled by globally traded feed commodities such as soy and fishmeal.

The science of animal feed – combining corn, soy, grains and ingredients like fishmeal to raise livestock faster, more efficiently and at a larger scale – has been central to the rise of modern civilisation. Techniques of animal husbandry emerged roughly 12,000 years ago in the so-called Fertile Crescent, a region stretching from Mesopotamia to Egypt. Alongside innovations such as irrigation and the plough, the domestication of livestock enabled humans to build stable food systems, settle permanently, and eventually develop cities. As farming shifted from grazing animals on open land to penning them, humans assumed responsibility for providing balanced diets, an early precursor to today’s industrial feed systems. 

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 global fishmeal superpower, responsible for roughly a quarter of worldwide production. Fishmeal became a critical input fuelling the post-World War 2 expansion of industrial chicken and hog farming, and later aquaculture, particularly in the US and northern Europe. The model spread far beyond Peru, reaching the coastline of west Africa – and in the process further distancing consumers from the ecological and human costs of production.

Aquaculture has existed in rudimentary forms for centuries, and it does have some clear benefits. Fish farming provides millions of people with year-round access to affordable protein. In India, aquaculture is a crucial source of jobs, especially for women. In Bangladesh, fish farming has driven an overall decline in the price of fish, making it more accessible for lower-income households. Even accounting for feed ingredients like soy and fishmeal, as well as transportation to the US, certain farmed fish – such as tilapia and Atlantic salmon – emit less greenhouse gas per pound than beef or pork. Farming bivalves, such as clams, oysters, scallops and mussels, is an especially sustainable type of aquaculture, since these species typically do not require feed and use relatively small amounts of land or freshwater. Harvesting them has a very low carbon footprint and produces shells that can function as a form of carbon capture, according to a 2020 paper in Nature Food. As of 2022, roughly a third of global aquaculture did not require external feed inputs.

The feed industry has emphasised that it is decreasing its reliance on fishmeal and fish oil, and especially on the use of whole fish or fish that can be eaten by people. However, as aquaculture overall grows, so too does demand for fishmeal. The total amount of global fishmeal production is predicted to rise by nearly 10%, mostly from trimmings, between 2022 and 2032, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. 

Asked about sustainability concerns tied to her industry, Véronique Jamin, a spokesperson from the international fishmeal association, the IFFO, said that fish farming is “the most efficient animal protein system”. She added that her organisation’s “role is not to advise which markets should use fishmeal and fish oil”. “Sustainability frameworks won’t work if they ignore real-world economics,” 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 various potential alternative food sources for carnivorous farmed fish – including seaweed, cassava waste, soldier fly larvae, single-cell proteins produced by fungi and bacteria, and even sewage. None is being produced affordably at scale, however. The alternatives often lack the full range of nutrients that support the growth of farmed fish, especially omega-3. Certain “green” options, such as insect meal, are expensive, and as a result there has been limited interest among feed companies to pay a premium for them. 

Feeding a South African market

As commodities, fishmeal and fish oil promise to grow in international importance. Starting in 2022, more than half of the seafood eaten globally came from fish farms rather than wild catch. Aquaculture is a $313-billion industry and the fastest-growing segment of global food production. Most of these fish farms are powered by fishmeal and fish oil. 

Fishing ships in South Africa target anchovies almost exclusively to be turned into fishmeal, because the species that swims in the country’s waters is too small and oily for humans to eat, according to a paper published by the trade minister. But animal conservationists say that the industry is taking a crucial food source away from the critically endangered African penguin, putting further pressure on a bird already in drastic decline. The stakes are high when it comes to the local economy, too: One penguin colony in Cape Town brings in about $16-million in tourism revenue every year. 

Beginning in 2022, scientists went to work trying to convince the South African government to implement a law that would ban fishing within a dozen miles of the country’s largest penguin colonies. Their efforts worked: In January 2024, the government announced a closure of commercial fishing in the waters around the penguin colonies for the next decade. Marine biologist Richard Sherley said the closures were likely to slow the decline in the penguins’ population.

The far greater burden of food insecurity, social unrest, and air and water pollution is borne by the poorer countries that produce the fishmeal or fishmeal-fed seafood that South Africa imports. Roughly half of the seafood eaten in South Africa in 2021 was imported, according to the South African Sustainable Seafood Initiative. Half of all seafood globally is farmed, and most of that is fed fishmeal. The fish farms in several of the countries that export the most seafood to South Africa – including Namibia, Norway, China, New Zealand and India – have ties to severe problems caused by fishmeal production, according to the investigation.

In India, the investigation found explosions, fires and worker asphyxiations at factories producing fishmeal that supplies the country’s shrimp farms, according to Bait to Plate. In 2020, at an Indian factory called United Marine Products, government inspectors discovered that plant operators had dumped wastewater into hidden boreholes, likely contaminating groundwater and making nearby villagers and livestock sick. At another factory called Bismi Aquatic Products in 2021, a migrant worker died while he was cleaning a wastewater tank and passed out from the fumes. Bismi Aquatic Products did not respond to a request for comment.

Most of the salmon eaten in South Africa, typically sold in the form of sushi served at restaurants, comes from Norwegian aquaculture farms, which rely heavily on imported fish feed made from wild-caught fish. The feed given to this salmon is linked to a range of documented impacts, including food insecurity in western Africa, pollution from waste and chemicals and the spread of parasites and disease to wild fish populations.

As the production of seafood has grown more globalised, its supply chains have stretched longer, and it has become tougher for consumers to know whether it was harvested sustainably or legally. Most grocers who sell the seafood are in the dark as well because tracking is difficult and costly. Robert K Stumberg, a professor at Georgetown Law and supply chain expert, said this is partly because grocers typically buy from wholesalers and rarely track their suppliers. The other reason may be plausible deniability, he added. “Companies can escape blame or the need to fix problems if they’re unaware of them.” 

Hidden costs

The investigation revealed a surprising diversity of hidden costs in the global feed industry. In Senegal, fishmeal production accelerated overfishing, eroding traditional fishing grounds and contributing to thousands of young men attempting deadly and desperate voyages at sea to Europe. In Russia, fishmeal workers were held captive in secluded company towns in remote parts of the country, or stuck on ships far from shore. “People have nowhere to go, no money,” one worker said in a plea to Vladimir Putin, who participated in an episode of a call-in television show about the fishmeal plant. “Please, help us,” a second worker said. In Chile, several hundred protesters burned tires and blocked coastal highways and railway tracks, demonstrating against the early closure of the fishing season, a move partly driven by overfishing tied to fishmeal.

The investigation also unveiled the hidden role of forced labour and land appropriation in China’s growing aquaculture industry. In 2025, South Africa imported more than $30-million worth of seafood from China, which is rapidly expanding its aquaculture industry and is now raising more than four times the amount of fish it catches. One of the fastest-growing regions in this boom is China’s mountainous and desert inland west, particularly Tibet and Xinjiang, two regions known for intense political repression. 

In Tibet, the Chinese government has relocated roughly half a million Tibetans, levelling villages and monasteries for development projects such as hydroelectric dams and fish farms. This effort often uses coercive tactics, including repeated home visits, threats of criminal prosecution and warnings that utilities could be cut off for those who refused to move, according to a 2024 Human Rights Watch report. In response to these sorts of policies, at least 169 Tibetans have set themselves on fire, typically on camera, outside police stations, monasteries or public squares. 

In Xinjiang, more than a million people have been held in detention camps, and the government has engaged in large-scale land seizures, forced sterilisations and criminal penalties for speaking native languages or practising religious and cultural traditions. 

The investigation mapped more than 1,000 fish farms in Xinjiang and Tibet that produce an estimated half-billion dollars’ worth of farmed seafood annually, much of which is exported to more than a dozen countries, including the US and Canada. The US bans all goods produced “wholly or in part” by workers in Xinjiang or by ethnic minorities from the region on the presumption that they were made with state-sponsored forced labour. 

Crimes and abuse hidden in supply chains

Where government regulators have proven lacking in ensuring that supply chains are free from unsustainable, illegal or unethical practices, industry-led certification programmes have sought to fill the gap. Critics say these programmes serve more as a sustainability smokescreen, giving downstream customers a way to avoid looking deeper into their supply chains. The programmes generally focus on environmental crimes, while mostly overlooking labour abuses on ships. 

Allie Brudney, a senior staff attorney at the strategic litigation nonprofit group Corporate Accountability Lab, said that on land – at processing plants or on farms – certification programmes rarely conduct true spot checks to authenticate the reassurances given by managers at the factories. Instead, the programmes frequently alert companies before inspectors show up, which gives them a chance to clean up the scene so there are no violations. At sea, these programmes also often rely on self-reported information from ship captains rather than having auditors directly visit and check conditions offshore on vessels, where crimes are most common. 

Devan Meserve, a spokesperson for the Global Seafood Alliance, which runs a programme called Best Aquaculture Practices, said that her organisation represents the “most comprehensive programme for farmed seafood”, partly because it covers the “entire aquaculture production chain”. Protecting workers on the fishing vessels that supply feed mills is, however, an “immense challenge”, she noted, because audits occur strictly at port and do not witness harvest conditions. Meserve added that her organisation helps the industry counter illegal and overfishing by requiring feed mills to source most of the fish they use in fishmeal or fish oil from fisheries accredited by certification programmes like MarinTrust and the Marine Stewardship Council. 

Partly bolstered by these certification programmes, seafood companies routinely make marketing claims about the ethics and sustainability of their seafood. Often, these claims fail to reckon with crimes or social concerns further up their supply chains, including on the ships or plants that produce the feed for the fish farms. This disconnect is creating growing legal risk for seafood companies and grocers. Since 2020, at least nine lawsuits alleging false advertising have been brought against six seafood companies across six US jurisdictions. The legal complaints focused on a common pattern: marketing claims that portrayed products as sustainable or ethically sourced, paired with supply chain evidence that suggested otherwise. Plaintiffs challenged language such as “sustainable”, “eco-friendly”, “all-natural”, “wild-caught” and “from the coast of Maine”, as well as claims of superior worker-safety standards.

Satellite imagery below shows existing homes within 500m of four different fishmeal plants under construction:

In at least four cases, the use of fishmeal or fish oil and their link to industrial fishing and ecosystem depletion were central to arguments that the products were not environmentally sustainable. Additional allegations included forced labour on fishing vessels and reliance on harmful pesticides and antibiotics. During this same period, seafood companies have paid more than $2-million in settlement fees to resolve false-advertising cases. The Outlaw Ocean Project investigation assessed more than 800 seafood companies that made marketing claims comparable to – or stronger than – those cited in the lawsuits and found that more than half of the companies had documented crimes or concerns within their supply chains. 

Dana Cleaveley, a research consultant formerly with SeaChoice, a Canadian environmental advocacy organisation focused on advancing sustainable seafood practices, said that historically, various industries have been forced to reckon with human rights and environmental crimes hidden within their supply chains. As examples, she cited sweatshop garments, blood diamonds and fair-trade coffee. The seafood industry, however, lags in terms of this type of accountability. As the world scrambles for protein and leans into aquaculture, this industry will have to catch up, Cleaveley said. That’s likely to happen when more countries impose import controls on seafood tainted with illegalities or unsustainable practices. “That’s when investors will begin to see material – not just reputational – risk, and companies will have to adjust.” DM

The reporting for this story was part of a larger investigation conducted by an international team of journalists based at The Outlaw Ocean Project.