how farming fish in Europe undermines food security and livelihoods in West Africa
Norwegian salmon industry’s voracious appetite for wild fish is driving loss of livelihoods and malnutrition in Africa.
Farming carnivorous fish in Europe harms fishing communities in West Africa by depriving them of a resource fundamental to their nutrition and their livelihoods. Salmon are carnivorous, and farmed salmon depend on the nutrients provided through fish oil in particular, gained through grinding up smaller, wild fish. At Feedback, we have evidence that in feeding these smaller fish (sardines, sardinella, ethmalosa, etc.) to Scottish farmed salmon, major micro-nutrient losses occur. How can we allow an industry driving biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, and food insecurity to simply go on with business-as-usual?
Keeping up the fight, we have been looking into the place for farmed salmon production, Norway, and have now published a new report, showcasing facts on the industry’s scale and power, its hunger for wild fish and its devastating impact on West African communities.
Our research shows that in 2020, nearly 2 million tonnes of wild fish were required to produce the fish oil supplied to the Norwegian farmed salmon industry and that throughout this feeding process, one-quarter of the wild fish ground up is lost. Furthermore, the amount of fish sourced off the West African coast (FAO area 34) to supply fish oil to the Norwegian salmon farming industry in 2020 could have provided between 2.5 million and 4 million people in the region with a year’s supply of fish.
Four big feed producers, MOWI, Skretting, Cargill and BioMar supply close to 100% of the feed used in Norwegian salmon farming, and all of them source fish oil from FAO 34. Despite public sustainability pledges, salmon and feed producers’ take-up of alternative ingredients to replace wild-caught fish in feed remains minimal. Without significant changes in feed composition, Norway’s ambition to triple salmon production to 5 million tonnes by 2050 would require over three times as much wild-caught fish as in 2020.
The extraction of fish from West Africa by corporations headquartered in the Global North for the benefit of mainly high-income consumers in Europe, North America and Asia has far-reaching consequences, further entrenching global inequity and food insecurity. Thus, the continuing expansion of industrial aquaculture is fuelling a type of food imperialism.
Norwegian salmon is available in most European markets and is sold as a premium product all around the world, including the Netherlands. Here, it is found in all major supermarkets such as Albert Heijn, Jumbo, Aldi, Plus, where customers will have to dig through supply chain layers via ASC codes for a chance (if given) at finding out the exact origin of the product.
Wholesalers such as Makro also sell farmed Atlantic salmon, with minimum information available for buyers, which, for consumers frequenting Horeca, makes it difficult to get reliable information on where the food they are considering to eat comes from. Makro, just like feed producer Skretting, is a subsidiary of SHV Holdings, a Dutch trading company with a turnover of 26 billion euros in 2022.
The Netherlands profits from Norway’s salmon boom in its role as a seafood trade hub, but also through processing and further exporting the farmed fish.
Luckily, the solutions are already on the table. Our modelling shows that an alternative aquaculture-fisheries model combining the direct consumption of wild-caught fish alongside salmon fed on fish oil and fishmeal exclusively made from trimmings (waste from processing), rather than whole fish, delivers the same amounts of key micronutrients for the same number of people, but freeing up nearly 1 million tonnes of wild fish to feed people, or to continue playing their critical role in the marine ecosystem.
For further info:
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/113682-002-A/data-sources/
https://journals.plos.org/sustainabilitytransformation/article?id=10.1371/journal.pstr.0000005
Tackling industrial fishmeal and fish oil production in West Africa