The Dirty Secret Behind the Farmed FishYou Eat
By Ian Urbina
Our appetite for seafood is growing. In the last 60 years, the global consumption of fish has more than doubled. As demand has increased, so have dangerous levels of overfishing: One-third of the world’s fish stocks are currently being harvested at unsustainable levels.
Fish farming, known as aquaculture, was supposed to help solve this problem by relieving some of the pressure on the planet’s oceans.
It is now a vast and innovative industry. Norwegian companies have built enormous, semi-submersible structures in the open ocean that can house as many as 1.5 million salmon. In China, huge aquaculture ships are equipped with breeding cabins capable of holding 90,000 cubic meters of water.
Today, more than half of all the seafood that’s eaten comes from aquaculture rather than wild catch. But aquaculture has a dark secret: Most of this farm-grown seafood is raised on other seafood taken from the oceans.
Think about it: Farm-raised fish have to eat something.
The most efficient way to feed them is to sweep up vast numbers of other smaller fish, which are turned into a nutrient-rich powder called fishmeal — or its liquid equivalent, fish oil. As a result, instead of relieving the pressure of overfishing, aquaculture is making the problem worse.
Those of us who have recently eaten farm-raised seafood are participating in a developing environmental crisis.
That would be bad enough, but the so-called reduction industry driving the crisis also flouts the law and puts people in danger. The production of fishmeal often involves forced labor and has led to worker deaths and the polluting of communities around the world. It has provoked political unrest in places like India and prompted countries to accuse others of violating their territorial waters. Dangerous chemicals, including antimicrobials, fire retardants and anesthetics, are often added to fish ponds and make their way into the seafood.
Some of the most popular types of seafood consumed in the United States — salmon and shrimp — are predominantly imported from farms that use fishmeal. They end up in supermarkets throughout the country, including popular retailers such as Walmart and Kroger, and appear on the menus of hundreds of thousands of restaurants and cafeterias, including those on Capitol Hill where senators and members of Congress eat lunch.
But the problem remains mostly invisible to the American consumer, obscured by marketing campaigns that highlight the clever, eco-friendly adaptations of the aquaculture industry. To create a clearer picture of its impact on humans and the planet, we conducted the most extensive audit ever of the fishmeal supply chain.
What we found is that more than 250 seafood companies have had crimes or concerns documented within their supply chains.
In their marketing, seafood companies routinely claim that what they’re selling is ethical and sustainable. They tend to focus on the engineering marvel of the farms and ignore the crimes and costs located further upstream in their supply chains. Our goal was to reveal all of those costs in order to understand the dark underbelly of an industry that has become one of the world’s dominant food suppliers.
To get the full picture, you have to start on the ships.
The fishing fleets that supply the world’s fishmeal industry total more than 10,000 vessels. These ships primarily target small schooling fish like anchovies, sardines and sprat that are caught specifically to be reduced into feed.
Along some coasts, they also catch larger fish that would otherwise be sold for people to eat.
Some fishmeal is made from the heads, guts and other remains after wild-caught fish have been processed for human consumption.
At any given time, many fishing vessels are operating illegally and taking measures to avoid detection by the authorities. Scientific studies have classified at least half of the species they capture as “overexploited,” or in danger of disappearing. Hundreds of the ships in the global fishmeal fleet are bottom trawlers, using weighted nets to scrape the ocean floor and devastating virtually everything in their path.
Our reporters boarded fishmeal ships from the South China Sea to the far reaches of the North Atlantic. We reviewed logbooks, interviewed workers and documented illegal practices. Hundreds of fishmeal vessels were found to be fishing in closed or protected seas, violating quotas on certain species, or fishing without licenses.
Trawlers drag huge nets to catch large numbers of fish at once. In the process, they can destroy the ecosystem and catch and kill other species.
Working conditions on some ships were abysmal. Deckhands described having their passports confiscated, being forced to work 15-hour days, and being beaten by ship officers. On Chinese and Russian ships, we uncovered worker fatalities and injuries and forced labor, including cases of debt bondage and deckhands who asked to leave the ship but were forbidden. Crew on one Chinese ship off the coast of West Africa slept on deck, exposed to waves and rain, or in dangerously hot and cramped quarters filled with exhaust fumes.
Since 2019, more than a dozen people have died working in the fishmeal industry in Peru, which is the world’s largest producer, typically providing more than a fifth of the global supply. Workers on the country’s vessels have sometimes fainted from the toxic gases emitted by the hundreds of tons of decaying fish in their holds. In 2023, two men asphyxiated after they fell into the hold of a ship while unloading anchovies for Copeinca, a major fishing company operating in Peru. (CFG Investment, the company that owned Copeinca at the time, did not respond to a request for comment. The current owner, the Canadian company Cooke, said the accident was not Copeinca’s responsibility but the fault of the fishermen themselves.)
Other workers fell overboard or were fatally struck by heavy equipment. Also in 2023, a fisherman with another Peruvian company, TASA, died at sea when he was hit by a cable. A spokesman for the company said TASA “mobilized all necessary human and logistical resources” in response to the accident and provided care to those affected by the death, including psychological support for the family.
Producing fishmeal, at sea and on land, is dangerous. Dozens of workers have died or been injured from sinkings, explosions or asphyxiation since 2019.
Workers are far from the only ones affected. Over the last decade, the fishmeal industry has decimated the food security and livelihoods of coastal communities.
For generations, the waters off West Africa were fished by fleets of brightly painted wooden pirogues and sustained a vibrant industry of dockworkers, traders and transporters, as well as thousands of women who smoked, dried and sold fish in local markets. But scores of fishmeal ships now plunder those waters, sending their catch to dozens of fishmeal factories in Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia.
Though new regulations have limited fishing intensity, Mauritania has been especially attractive because its waters are unusually rich in marine life, fed by a robust nutrient upwelling that the Canary Current generates along the coast. There, Chinese and Turkish ships sweep up bonga shad, sardines, and round and flat sardinella — species known as forage fish, which are toward the bottom of the food chain and are eaten by other marine life or seabirds.
They’re also eaten by humans. Such fish are critical to the food security of millions of people in West Africa; sardinella, a small fish that provides an outsize dose of vital nutrients, is among the region’s cheapest and most important sources of animal protein. Since the fishmeal industry expanded into West Africa, round sardinella stocks have fallen to their lowest level ever recorded. Today, three of those four species are classified by the United Nations as overexploited.
The fishmeal industry turns cheap sources of food into feed for farmed fish. It takes over 700 wild anchovies to feed one farmed salmon.
Much of the damage being done by the foreign fishmeal ships off West Africa, it turns out, has gone undetected. Ships turn off their transponders or falsify their bearings through “position spoofing” to avoid any meaningful monitoring by local authorities. This practice is especially common off the coast of Mauritania: From 2019 to 2025, at least 21 foreign fishing vessels operating there disguised their location, according to satellite data. Many others routinely engaged in transshipment, the banned practice of transferring fish to refrigeration ships instead of returning to port, thereby skirting local taxes, quotas and regulations for protected species. Fishing vessels can more easily evade this rule if they disappear from satellite tracking.
The Mauritanian government’s oversight of its fish stocks and the livelihoods they support has been mixed. While the World Bank in 2025 ranked Mauritania ahead of most African countries at keeping industrial vessels out of protected waters, watchdogs say the government still struggles to determine who is fishing, how much is caught and whether regulators consistently enforce the rules for vessels at sea.
Charged with “publishing misleading information” on the internet, he was imprisoned, his head was shaved, and he was put in a rat- and roach-infested cell with two dozen others. Unwilling to sign a letter apologizing to the coast guard and the fisheries agency, he was held for roughly two months and then released after pressure from international human rights organizations.
Much like Mauritania, Senegal appears to have little desire to prioritize its people’s interests over foreign investment. In 2024, the European Union issued a “yellow card” warning to the country for insufficient cooperation in combating illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
In Senegal, the fishmeal industry has created a wave of migration. The fish are overexploited, leaving many unemployed and with few options.
The ravaging of these already overexploited fish stocks has been a major driver of migration, according to the United Nations. Thousands of Senegalese fishermen have lost their jobs, prompting many of them to use their boats to flee the country. Typically, they try to make the nearly 1,000-mile journey from Senegal to Europe’s nearest touch point, Spain’s Canary Islands.
The migration route from West Africa to the Canary Islands has claimed thousands of lives. In September 2024, a fishing boat carrying roughly 100 migrants bound for Spain capsized, killing more than two dozen people. One survivor was Cheikhou Omar, a 21-year-old who made it to shore by clinging to the wreckage for 10 hours. He explained to our reporters how the fishmeal industry played a role in his decision to migrate. “We’re fishermen,” he told them, “but there’s no fish left here.”
After the fish are caught, the next step in turning them into feed is to deliver them to one of the 1,400 fishmeal plants around the globe.
During our investigation, we visited plants in Peru, Gambia, India, Indonesia, Mauritania, Senegal and Thailand.
Often found along the coast, these facilities are warehouses filled with huge mounds of decaying fish that are shoveled or backhoed into giant machines that cook, press, dry and then grind them up.
Despite corporate promises that fishmeal plants would create significant numbers of jobs, most of the facilities visited by our reporters had fewer than six workers present at any given time. Their jobs consisted of bagging the meal, driving forklifts and loading sacks onto trucks and shipping containers.
The cooking and pulverizing of millions of tons of fish creates a rancid, overpowering smell that can harm tourism by scaring off beach visitors and causing restaurants to close. The odor is more than just unpleasant; it’s a health hazard. In 2021, two fishermen in Chancay, Peru, died from chemical asphyxiation while unloading a vessel at a fishmeal plant. (The company, Pesquera Caral, did not respond to a request for comment.)
The unique “fishy” smell from rotting seafood comes from a chemical called trimethylamine, or TMA, which has been found to be carcinogenic. Globally, more than 16.5 million people, including nearly two million under the age of 15, live within a mile of the industry’s 1,400 plants.
More than 16.5 million people live within a mile of the industry’s 1,400 plants, which emit carcinogenic chemicals.
In India alone, 388,000 people, including thousands of young children, live close to such plants. As of 2022, India was producing more than 300,000 tons of fishmeal annually, at least half of which was consumed domestically, largely to feed the country’s shrimp farms. Most of the remaining fishmeal was exported, making India the world’s third largest source of the feed.
But that economic success has not prevented fishmeal production from being a source of civil unrest. In recent years, plants in India were frequently the target of protests or strikes that aimed to shut them down. Residents claimed that the odor emanating from the plants was unbearable and caused breathing problems for children, elderly people and pregnant women. Protesters have blockaded roads to stop trucks, clashed with the police and, in one instance, spurred a boycott of local elections.
Such demonstrations sometimes turn violent. On April 19, 2024, the police clashed with protesters seeking to shut down the NPM fishmeal facility and other fish processing plants in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. When residents of one village staged a sit-in protest in the streets, a group of masked men carrying knives, bottles and clubs — thought to be acting at the behest of plant owners — emerged from an S.U.V. and attacked the protesters. Villagers lobbed stones at the S.U.V. and vandalized police squad cars. (NPM did not respond to a request for comment.)
A fishmeal plant comes with high risk of fire, pollution and civil unrest. The stench of cooking fish emanates for miles in every direction.
The pollution at fishmeal plants goes beyond carcinogenic odors. In November 2020, authorities discovered that four facilities in an industrial area in Goa were disposing of waste into secretly drilled boreholes on their land, contaminating groundwater and sickening livestock and locals. In 2024, sections of the Periyar River in the state of Keralam frequently turned black, and thousands of dead fish rose to the surface — a pattern that residents said was most likely caused by fishmeal and other factories dumping their waste upstream.
Fire is another hazard at these plants. Fishmeal heats up as it decomposes and can combust spontaneously when stored. Since 2018, there have been at least 20 fires or explosions at fishmeal plants or on fishmeal vessels globally. On Aug. 7, 2023, three explosions at a fishmeal plant in Chimbote, on Peru’s coast, shattered windows of neighboring houses and sent dark smoke billowing into the sky. Angry residents took to the city’s streets in protest. “Don’t murder my children,” one protester’s sign read.
Local officials said they were gathering evidence that the explosions had been harmful to residents. “It must be demonstrated whether there have been any health effects,” an official from the local environmental assessment office told a Chimbote radio station. (An executive at the company that owned the plant, Pesquera Exalmar, said the explosions had occurred strictly within its boundaries and had “no impact on the structural integrity of adjacent homes.”)
Policing the fishmeal industry has proved difficult because the countries in which the feed is produced are typically poor and therefore eager for foreign investment. In Peru, foreign companies control the industry through direct plant ownership and dominant product purchasing power. Some of the biggest players driving global expansion are Cooke in Canada, which acquired Peru’s top fishing company in 2024; Austevoll Seafood in Norway, which owns the major Peruvian producer Austral Group; and several Chinese companies, which claim the bulk of Peru’s catch quota for anchoveta, a species of anchovy. As a result, these outside companies wield undue political leverage when it comes to ignoring rules.
So where does all the fishmeal — produced at such high human and environmental costs — end up?
Mostly in China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Norway, which have turned fish farming into an industrial enterprise. More than a thousand farm sites dot Norway’s coastline, where companies like Mowi, which controls about a fifth of the world’s farmed salmon business, have bred fish that resist infection. Robots use underwater lasers to kill sea lice, a parasite that feeds on salmon.
These operations have an immense impact on the world’s ecosystems. At some Norwegian fish farms, a single salmon can eat anywhere from two to more than five times its weight in wild-caught fish. Altogether, the country’s fish farms produce three times as much waste in a year as the country’s 5.6 million residents flush down their toilets, according to a recent report from the Sunstone Institute, a global data science organization. The farms’ waste, which consists of salmon feces, rotting carcasses and uneaten feed, mostly cascades to the coastal seafloor, forming a noxious sludge that smothers marine life.
Fish in farms produce waste. Salmon feces and uneaten feed end up forming a noxious sludge on the seafloor.
No country, however, is a larger producer of farmed seafood than China. Remarkably, China has built its aquaculture industry even in its far northwest Xinjiang region, the most landlocked part of the planet. Though just a tenth of Xinjiang’s 620,000 square miles are fit for human habitation, the region now hosts roughly 1,000 fish farms. These operations, which include farms in the Taklamakan Desert, China’s largest, produce almost 200,000 tons of seafood annually: salmon, trout, crayfish, bass, carp, crab, shrimp and tilapia.
The Chinese government directed the development of inland aquaculture in response to the environmental harms from its earlier fish-farming efforts, which were concentrated along the eastern coast. Through the 1980s and 1990s, local governments converted tidal flats and estuaries into shrimp ponds and marine cages, building hatcheries, feed mills and export infrastructure. But waste runoff from fish farms became a major source of pollution, degrading critical waterways, including the Yangtze River, which supplies much of the freshwater to Shanghai, and the Pearl River Delta, which supplies Hong Kong.
To create fish farms in the Taklamakan Desert, bulldozers flattened and compacted the sand before engineers tapped shallow wells — about six feet deep — to fill artificial ponds with brackish groundwater. Technicians seeded them with microorganisms that adjust the water’s chemistry to something closer to seawater, effectively transforming desert groundwater into a marine environment.
China is the biggest producer of farmed seafood in the world. Fish farms abound even in the country’s vast Taklamakan Desert.
China trumpets its success in this forbidding region — an undeniable feat. Its state media refers to the desert fish farms as the “blue miracle.” Xinjiang’s aquaculture is not merely about producing fish, a column published by the state news outlet CGTN boasted in 2025, but also about the nation’s “protein security” and sustaining harmony between people and nature. “From snow-fed rivers to desert oases,” the column said, “Xinjiang has shown that blue dreams can indeed flourish on dry land.”
The company Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture, one of China’s most celebrated success stories, produces seafood that is exported to more than a dozen countries, including the United States. The government aggressively promotes the region’s products, funding media tours of its fish farms for foreign reporters and drawing visitors to what one official has called “Xinjiang’s first cold-water fish theme park,” featuring a museum and a seafood restaurant.
China’s farmed seafood exports have become a source of concern among academic researchers and watchdog organizations for their extensive use of antimicrobials and anesthetics, which are used to ward off disease and keep fish calm in their crowded pens. By 2017, according to a paper in the journal Scientific Reports, more than half of all antifungals and antibiotics used in aquaculture worldwide were dispensed at Chinese facilities. Fish farmed this way can pose a health risk to those who consume it.
In recent decades, often in response to public pressure, the American government has started to crack down on illegally or unfairly produced foreign goods, such as diamonds, garments and coffee. But there has been little outcry to date about seafood imports or the government’s performance in policing their origins and quality.
As of now, farmed fish produced using fishmeal is everywhere, sold in big grocery stores like Walmart and Kroger and served in cafeterias — even on Capitol Hill. If in the past year or so you sat down at any of the handful of cafeterias frequented by members of Congress, their staffs, and visitors in town for a tour, there’s a decent chance you dined on farmed seafood produced using fishmeal. Some of it could even have originated in Xinjiang, despite the fact that, in 2021, Congress banned entry of any goods produced “wholly or in part” in the region, on the presumption that such products involve state-imposed forced labor. (The U.S. government has formally characterized China’s actions in Xinjiang as a form of genocide.)
But American authorities inspect only a minuscule fraction of the seafood that is imported by China to the United States. Just this summer, after the Outlaw Ocean Project testified before Congress about the illegal flow of seafood from Xinjiang into the United States, the federal government added another Chinese exporter of farmed seafood to its list of banned companies: Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture.
Producing about 40 percent of China’s farmed salmon, Tianyun ships its fish through a major Chinese processor, Dalian Rich, which has supplied the American seafood brand Aqua Star, whose products are sold by Walmart and other major outlets, like the food distribution giant Sysco. Food from Sysco goes to nearly every corner of the American marketplace — more than 400,000 businesses in the last six weeks alone — as well as public school cafeterias, federal prisons, military bases and the dining halls on Capitol Hill.
(Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture said that it strictly complies with China’s laws on labor and contracts, and that it “has never been involved in, nor will it ever participate in, any form of forced labor.” A Sysco spokeswoman said the company takes seriously its obligation and commitment to uphold all international and local laws that protect labor, human and child labor rights, as well as the environment. Dalian Rich and Aqua Star did not respond to requests for comment. Walmart confirmed that it sources seafood from Aqua Star.)
Sysco says on its website that its “reputation is built upon the highest ethical standards of business conduct and fair dealing.” But our investigation found that fishing ships that supply Copeinca, the company whose workers died by toxic fume inhalation and that produces fishmeal for shrimp sold by Sysco, were tied to at least 30 fishing violations or other concerns, including fishing in marine protected areas, exceeding catch limits, and operating without a valid permit. (Copeinca said that it had “all valid permits required under Peruvian fisheries regulations,” and that there were no “final sanctions” on some of these matters because the company was disputing or appealing them.)
The gap between marketing rhetoric and supply-chain realities is common across the industry. Since 2019, at least nine lawsuits alleging false advertising have been brought against seafood companies in the United States. The companies paid more than $2 million in settlement fees to resolve the cases. Dana Cleaveley, a research consultant formerly with SeaChoice, a Canadian sustainable-seafood group, says that as the public exerts more pressure on the seafood industry to better police supply chains, “investors will begin to see material, not just reputational, risk, and companies will have to adjust.”
The popularity of farmed seafood, in the United States and elsewhere, is only going to grow. The United Nations predicts that almost two-thirds of seafood eaten worldwide will come from aquaculture by 2035. Most of that production is likely to rely on fishmeal.
One way the industry could adjust would be to farm more seafood that does not need to be fed other fish. Bivalves like mussels, oysters, clams and scallops grow by filtering food from the water, so they don’t require manufactured feed. And where that feed is still needed, it could be made through the more efficient processing of leftovers — wasting less of the fish caught in the wild — and alternative ingredients such as algae, insects and microbial proteins.
Otherwise, the once-glowing promise of fish farming — grow more fish, catch fewer fish — is likely to remain broken.
Ian Urbina is a former New York Times investigative reporter who runs the Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C. that produces stories about human rights, the environment and labor concerns. This reporting is part of a larger investigation conducted by an international team of journalists based at the Outlaw Ocean Project.