Salmon farming does NOT ensure global food security
Still image taken from this short video
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Quoting the US business magazine Forbes:
“A new report from the FAIRR Initiative—an $80 trillion-backed investor network focused on ESG risks in protein production—exposes a growing contradiction at the heart of the global salmon farming industry. The sector markets itself as sustainable yet increasingly relies on a shrinking, finite resource—wild fish—for its survival.”
“ ‘We are relying on a finite input to fuel infinite growth projections,’ Laure Boissat, Oceans Programme Manager at FAIRR, told me in an interview. ‘That’s not resilience—it’s a recipe for collapse.’ ”
“Novel ingredients like insect meal, algae oil, and single-cell proteins were once seen as game-changers. Four years later, their use remains limited as challenges abound including high production costs, scalability issues, nutritional limitations, and consumer skepticism.”
“ ‘Fed aquaculture is simply inefficient,’ Boissat emphasized. ‘We must rethink what seafood production looks like in the 21st century.’”
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“A better use of wild fish used as aquafeeds would be redirecting them towards direct human consumption instead. A recent study by Willer et al., (2024) found that directly consuming fish traditionally used as aquafeed such as anchovies and mackerel would provide a more nutrient rich food than the salmon they are used to feed, as only 1-49% of essential dietary minerals and fatty acids available in wild fish are retained in farmed salmon (Willer et al., 2022). Atlantic salmon currently uses 60% of global fish oil and 23% of global fishmeal used in aquaculture, yet salmon production is only 4.5% of global aquaculture yield (Willer et al., 2022). Reallocating wild fish used for aquaculture to human consumption would increase seafood production and allow the by-products to still be retained for further use, thus maximising nutrient utilisation of marine resources (Willer et al., 2024). Removing wild-caught fish from salmonid production could leave 3.7 Mt fish in the sea while increasing global seafood production by 6.1 Mt (Willer et al., 2022).”
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“Atlantic salmon, as a carnivorous fish, requires a large input of fat and protein to grow and develop into a product that salmon farmers can sell. Whatever the source of the ingredients, that absolute amount of nutrients required to produce salmon will not fall, and salmon will continue to be a resource intensive, net consumer of food.”
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“Global north's growing appetite for farmed salmon imperils communities' access to local fish, study warns.
“Despite industry claims to the contrary, these findings highlight how the growing appetite for expensive farmed salmon can leave coastal communities struggling to access affordable local fish like sardines and anchovies.”
“’The salmon industry is a not a food production system—it's a food reduction system. It benefits the few who can afford it, but reduces access to nutritious fish for those who need it the most,’ said Dr. Matthews.”
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“Aquacultured carnivorous species consume most of the world’s fishmeal and fish oil (FMFO), which itself is primarily derived from small pelagic fish. This has raised concerns about the practice’s impact on wild fish stocks, ecosystems, and coastal communities that rely on these fish. The aquaculture industry claims a decreasing dependence on wild fish, relying on the Fish In:Fish Out (FIFO) metric as a ratio of the quantity of wild fish required for farmed fish production. This is misleading because it usually assumes constant FM or FO yields, inclusion rates and feed conversion ratios, which vary widely. Thus, a constant FIFO value for a given species cannot be assumed. Furthermore, low FIFO values resulting from averaging carnivores and herbivores conceal the high feed requirements of carnivore species. The increasing use of FMFO from by-products does not demonstrate a decreased use of wild fish but rather reflects a growing demand for FMFO, particularly for the fast growing and valuable salmon and shrimp farming industries.”
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“The following example for 1 kg of carnivorous fish like salmon, with yields for FM = 22.5% and for FO = 5%, inclusion rates for FM = 24% and for FO = 16%, and an FCR = 1.25%, shows that although there is less FO than FM in the feed, more fish is needed to produce the FO, and the resulting FIFO shows that at least 4 kg of wild fish are needed to produce 1 kg of farmed fish.” [FM=fishmeal; FO=fish oil; FCR=feed conversion ratio; FIFO=fish-in-fish-out ratio]
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“The authors, […] debunk the industry's use of the "Fish-in-Fish-out" (FIFO) ratio—the standard metric used to quantify how much wild fish is used to produce farmed fish.”
“The FIFO ratio is often used as an indicator of the impact of aquaculture on wild fish stocks.”
“In the paper, the authors showcase several misleading practices about the FIFO ratio, such as averaging fishmeal and fish oil inputs of carnivores and herbivores together to conceal the high feed requirements of carnivorous species.”
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● 1.61 million tonnes of farmed fish consumed 2.34 million tonnes of feed in Norway in 2023. Reference
This feed tonnage refers to dry weight. Reference
● To compare these numbers as FIFO (fish-in-fish-out) is misleading
“This is hidden by the FCR [feed conversion ratio] definition, which uses dry weight for the feed intake (and most live fish consist of 75 to 80% water; see FishBase, www.fishbase.org/) and wet weight for the weight gain. Thus, as usually defined, the aquaculture FCR is misleading, as it suggests a production efficiency based on numbers that cannot be directly compared.”
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“The growth of animal aquaculture requires ever more feed. Yet, fish and crustacean farming is argued to be sustainable because wild fish use is low and has improved over time. Here, accounting for trimmings and by-products from wild fish in aquaculture feed, and using four different sources of industry-reported feed composition data, we find ratios of fish inputs to farmed outputs of 0.36 to 1.15 – 27 to 307% higher than a previous estimate of 0.28. Furthermore, a metric that incorporates wild fish mortality during capture and excludes unfed systems raises the wild fish mortality–to–farmed fish output ratio to 0.57 to 1.78. We also evaluate terrestrial ingredients in aquaculture feeds. Widely cited estimates of declines in wild fish use from 1997 to 2017 entailed a trade-off of more than fivefold increase in feed crops over the same period. Our assessment challenges the sustainability of fed aquaculture and its role in food security.”
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“Our investigations and research have enabled us to draw direct and indirect links between unsustainable and ecologically damaging practices as a result of FMFO [fishmeal and fish oil] production and the handful of multinationals that control the majority of global aquafeed trade: […]”
“This report has brought to light widespread – and often illegal – unsustainable practices linked to the production of FMFO for use in global aquaculture supplying markets in Europe and other regions of the Global North. Evidence gathered at fishing ports and fishmeal and fish oil (FMFO) production plants in India, Vietnam and The Gambia clearly demonstrates that the FMFO industry poses a serious threat to marine ecosystems and global food security and that, by continuing with extractive and unethical practices, it will be the architect of its own downfall.”
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“However, the argument that feed ingredients derived from by-products and plants are more sustainable needs further consideration. A recent comparative LCA [life cycle analysis] considering different aquafeed ingredients found that ingredients performed differently across different categories, as expected, but that by products from fish for human consumption converted into fishmeal and fish oil had a higher global warming potential than fish meal and fish oil from purpose harvested fisheries (Silva et al., 2017). In fact, all the alternative ingredients proposed (by-product fish meal and fish oil, by-product poultry meal and fat, and soy meal and oil) performed worse than conventional fishmeal and fish oil across every metric, with soy meal and oil sometimes giving comparable but marginally higher values. The method of accounting can have a large impact on the results of a LCA; however, this demonstrates that by-product substitutions are not the silver bullet they are often presented to be. One feeding trial found that the feeding salmon an insect/algal based fish feed compared to marine caught wild feed also resulted in a greater environmental impact (Goglio et al., 2022).”
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“European aquaculture is dependent on imported feed from marine and terrestrial systems, such as fish meal, oil and soy, particularly for carnivorous species such as salmon. Substituting plant for marine ingredients just shifts the impact from sea to land, and also risks compromising the health and welfare of the cultured animal.” – says Stirling PhD researcher Wesley Malcorps, who is part of the Green Aquaculture Intensification in Europe (GAIN) project.
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“Here, we assess and compare the environmental footprint of farming industrial broiler chickens and farmed salmonids (salmon, marine trout, and Arctic char) to identify opportunities to reduce environmental pressures.”
“We found that farming broiler chickens disturbs 9 times more area than farming salmon (924,000 vs. 103,500 km2) but yields 55 times greater production.”
“Industrial production of broiler chickens and farmed salmon represent two of the largest animal-sourced food sectors in their respective realms (land and sea), offering a compelling case study of production trajectories and environmental footprints.”
“Salmon pressures are more varied, with 14% of CPI [cumulative pressure index] on land due to salmon aquaculture currently consuming 2.3 million tonnes of crops for feed. This largely consists of oil crops, soybean, and wheat.”
“One factor contributing to these efficiencies is the very fast reproductive cycle of chickens compared with salmon: 6–7 chickens can typically be produced in the same location in a given year, taking 6–8 weeks to reach slaughter weight; whereas salmon take 12–24 months to reach slaughter size, excluding the land-based, freshwater period.”