On March 6, 2024, Pascal Goumain, the president of Saumon de France, was presenting his company’s salmon pens in Cherbourg as part of France’s food future. In an interview, Goumain described plans to adapt the farm to climate change and pointed to official backing for expansion. The promise of fish farming, he argued, is that it is both sustainable and important for food sovereignty.
The Haut-Commissariat au Plan on fish farming echoed the point in 2023, asserting that in a context of climate change and overfishing, the “responsible development” of aquaculture could expand supply without undermining the fishing sector. Globally, the ocean-sustainability argument for fish farming – “grow more, so we can catch less” – is one of the reasons that the $313-billion aquaculture industry is currently the fastest-growing food sector, and why half of the seafood eaten around the world is now farm-raised rather than caught at sea. A worker tosses fishmeal pellets into pens at a fish farm in Thailand in 2021.
Over half of the seafood eaten worldwide comes from fish farms. © Mako Kurokawa There is a problem, though. The most popular types of farmed seafood consumed in France – salmon, shrimp, trout, sea bass, sea bream – are fed the kinds of wild fish that aquaculture claims to be saving, thereby accelerating ocean depletion, not slowing it, he explained. Two-thirds of global aquaculture grows species that are fed fishmeal and fish oil, ingredients made by cooking and pulverising wild-caught fish.
Before it reaches market, a farmed salmon, for instance, eats at some farms more than six times its weight in wild-caught fish. To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading.
To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Cover image: India: the ‘shrimp empire’ and a symbol of the excesses of aquaculture. © Outlaw Ocean Project 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 organization 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. What economists often call “externalities", 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. 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.
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