Fish Farming Is Just Fishing With Extra Steps
Europe keeps selling aquaculture as an environmental fix. Farm fish instead of emptying the seas. Feed the population without destroying ecosystems. A clean technological solution to a messy ecological problem. In reality, modern European aquaculture is built on the same extraction logic as industrial fishing, just with extra steps and better branding. It does not replace exploitation of wild animals. It reorganises it, concentrates it, and hides it behind cages and supply chains.
What Europe is expanding is not seaweed that absorbs carbon. It is the farming of predators. Salmon, trout, seabass, seabream, tuna. Animals whose bodies are literally built from other animals. Keeping them alive in tanks and sea cages requires vast quantities of fishmeal and fish oil, produced by killing small wild fishes by the billion and rendering them into powder and fat. This is not an unfortunate side effect. It is the core input.
As production of these species rises, so does the demand for wild feed fish. Not in theory. In practice. Projections for European aquaculture show roughly a 30% increase in output of carnivorous and omnivorous species by 2040, alongside a 70% increase in demand for wild-caught forage fish to feed them. That is not decoupling aquaculture from fishing. That is formalising a pipeline that transfers animals from the open ocean into feed mills so wealthier consumers can keep eating luxury seafood.
Forage fish are not waste biomass waiting to be monetised. They are the structural glue of marine ecosystems, moving energy from plankton to larger fishes, seabirds and marine mammals. Remove them in industrial quantities and food webs unravel. This is basic ecology. Yet policy treats these animals as expendable inputs because they are small, cheap and invisible to consumers.
The social cost is just as deliberate. In many parts of West Africa, Southeast Asia and South America, the same species targeted for reduction into feed are staple foods and major sources of income. Diverting them into aquaculture supply chains means less affordable protein for local communities and more dependence on volatile global markets.
Spain is a clear example of how this plays out. It is one of Europe’s largest consumers of fishmeal and fish oil, sourcing these inputs from more countries than any other European state. When anchovy supply from Peru declined due to climate variability and domestic protections, Spain did not reduce its dependence on wild feed fish. It simply shifted sourcing to other regions, including countries where sardine and sardinella stocks are already severely overexploited and where illegal and unreported fishing remains widespread. The problem is not weak regulation in a few unlucky places. The problem is that the business model requires continuous extraction, so pressure is exported to wherever resistance is lowest.
At the same time, Europe is not only expanding existing carnivorous farming. It is actively introducing new species into captivity, and most of them still rely on animal protein. Since the mid-1980s, dozens of new species have been added to commercial aquaculture in Europe, with roughly 70% dependent on feeds derived from other animals. Each new species locks in future demand for wild fish and tightens the system’s dependence on finite ecosystems. This is not diversification for resilience. It is diversification of exploitation routes. This is the context in which octopus farming is now being pushed.
Octopus populations are under increasing pressure, and prices are rising. The industry response is not to question demand, but to industrialise production. Spain is again at the centre, with plans for the world’s first large-scale octopus farm in the Canary Islands. Initial targets already involve around a million individuals per year, with plausible growth to several million as production scales. The industry presents this as innovation. What it actually represents is the extension of intensive animal production into a species whose biology is fundamentally incompatible with factory conditions.
Octopuses are highly intelligent, behaviourally complex and naturally solitary. They explore, manipulate objects, solve problems and avoid one another outside of breeding. Confining them in crowded tanks creates predictable outcomes: aggression, injury and cannibalism. There is no established welfare framework for farming cephalopods at industrial scale, no settled standards for handling or slaughter, and no evidence that their behavioural needs can be met in intensive systems. Yet production is being planned first, with welfare treated as a technical issue to be patched later.
The feed problem does not disappear either. Octopuses are carnivores with high protein demands. Depending on how generously industry claims about feed efficiency are interpreted and how much fishmeal is included in the diet, a single octopus facility could consume tens of thousands of tonnes of wild fish each year, rising sharply as production expands. That translates into billions of additional animals taken from already pressured ecosystems to feed animals confined in tanks. The same ecological damage. The same displacement of human food. Just applied to a new species.
Supporters point to alternative feed ingredients as proof that the system can be cleaned up. Fish by-products. Algae. Plant proteins. Insects. Single-cell organisms. These inputs are real, but they are being used as narrative insulation, not structural change. Even when alternative ingredients reduce the proportion of wild fish in feed, they do not fix the central problem of farming high-trophic animals in the first place. Carnivorous aquaculture remains resource-intensive, energy-hungry and locked into long, fragile supply chains that externalise environmental and social costs elsewhere. Substituting one input does not undo a production model built on turning animals into commodities at scale.
What Europe is choosing to prioritise is not ecological sense, but profit structure. Carnivorous species command higher prices, attract investment and fit export-oriented growth strategies. Subsidies, research funding and infrastructure follow that money, not environmental reality. The result is a sector politically committed to feed-based expansion even while presenting itself as a solution to overfishing.
This is the pattern that links salmon cages, tuna ranches and now octopus tanks. Not technological failure. Not lack of data. A political economy that treats wild animals as raw material, poorer regions as supply zones, and sentient individuals as production units, while marketing the end product as sustainable progress.
If Europe is serious about marine protection and global food justice, expanding carnivorous aquaculture cannot continue. Phasing out reliance on purpose-caught wild fish for feed is not radical. It is the minimum required to stop institutionalising ecological collapse. And refusing to industrialise species whose physical and psychological needs cannot be met in captivity is not emotional. It is an ethical baseline.
Octopus farming is not an unfortunate side project that can be regulated into acceptability. It is the logical next step of a system that has already decided that intelligence, social complexity and ecological role do not count when profit is on the table. Allow it, and the precedent is clear. Any animal becomes farmable once demand is high enough and resistance is weak enough.
Aquaculture could support food systems that respect ecological limits and reject the idea that animals are resources to be converted into commodities. But that requires abandoning the fantasy that farming animals at scale is compatible with sustainability or justice. What Europe is building now is not a fix for industrial fishing. It is the same extractive mindset, rebranded, and expanding into new bodies.