The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization wants to increase aquaculture production by 75% by 2040.

The plan is being sold as part of a “blue transformation” to meet growing demand, improve food security and help eradicate hunger. There is just one rather enormous problem. To farm more fish, we have to catch and kill tens of billions more fish. This is not a clever solution to fishing. It is fishing with extra steps.

According to modelling produced with the University of British Columbia, continuing current industry trends could mean catching up to 34.6 million tonnes of wild fish every year by 2040 just to feed farmed aquatic animals.

Under a scenario weighted towards feed-intensive species such as salmon and shrimp, that could reach 41.4 million tonnes. That is equivalent to 46% of the entire global wild-fish catch recorded in 2020. Nearly half.

Caught from the ocean, killed, ground into meal and oil, then fed to other animals who are imprisoned, fattened and killed themselves. And this is supposed to help the oceans?

Fish Do Not Magically Appear On Farms

Aquaculture has been aggressively marketed as an alternative to catching fish from the wild. But carnivorous farmed species such as salmon and trout have to eat. Their feed commonly contains fishmeal and fish oil produced from wild-caught animals including anchovies, sardines and mackerel.

These fish are not some meaningless raw material. They are animals in their own right. They are also fundamental parts of marine ecosystems, transferring energy through food webs and feeding larger fish, seabirds and marine mammals. We are removing them by the billion to feed other animals because humans have decided they want salmon available cheaply and constantly.

Research suggests European demand for wild forage fish used in aquaculture feed could increase 70% by 2040, reaching 2.5 million tonnes annually.

That represents somewhere between 83 billion and 192 billion individual fish every year. And those are only the fish being turned into feed for European aquaculture. The scale is grotesque.

The Numbers May Be Even Worse

Even existing estimates of aquaculture’s dependence on wild fish may seriously understate the problem. A peer-reviewed study examining wild-fish inputs found that conventional calculations can exclude animals who absolutely died because of the industry.

Around 66% of fish trimmings used in feed come from wild-caught fish, yet they may be classified as “byproducts” and excluded from wild-fish input calculations. Even whole fish can effectively disappear from the accounting if they were not the intended target species. Fish who die during capture but escape the net can disappear too. Once researchers tried to account more accurately for what was happening, estimates of wild-fish input were as much as 307% higher than previous figures. For salmon specifically, producing one pound of farmed salmon may require between 1.86 and 6.24 pounds of wild fish.

We kill several pounds of fish to produce one pound of another fish. Calling this food production does not make the arithmetic any less ridiculous. Research suggests fish and crustacean farming can produce a net loss of both calories and protein.

And People Are Losing That Food

The absurdity becomes uglier when you look at where many of these fish come from. Wild fish used for feed are frequently taken from regions including West Africa, where the same animals currently provide food and income for coastal communities. Up to 90% of wild fish currently used in aquaculture feed could reportedly be eaten directly by humans. In Senegal, annual fish consumption per person fell by more than 10kg between 1999 and 2019.

A Changing Markets Foundation investigation estimated that enough fish to feed 33 million people across West Africa were instead being turned into feed for animals every year.

So let us understand what is happening.

Fish are taken from ecosystems. Fish are taken away from communities who currently depend upon them. Those fish are killed and ground up. Their bodies are transported elsewhere. They are fed to other imprisoned animals. Those animals are then killed too. And somehow this process is being discussed as a contribution to food security. You could not design a more perverse system if you tried.

This Is Factory Farming In Water

Industrial fish farms confine enormous numbers of sentient animals in crowded environments where disease, parasites and mass mortality are predictable consequences. The environmental problems do not disappear either.

Farmed fish have been estimated to produce around 14kg of carbon dioxide-equivalent per kilogram of food product, with feed responsible for up to 94% of emissions from salmon farming.

Replacing fishmeal with crops does not magically solve everything. Between 1997 and 2017, aquaculture increased its use of feed crops by 468%. The pressure simply moves from marine ecosystems to terrestrial ones.

Then there is shrimp farming, which has been linked to 38% of global mangrove deforestation. Apparently destroying extraordinary carbon-rich ecosystems is also part of saving the oceans.

Stop Calling This A Solution

The FAO’s proposed expansion is not inevitable. Different farming systems would produce very different outcomes. But that is precisely why a target for enormous expansion is so reckless.

The answer is not to find increasingly elaborate ways to imprison aquatic animals while hiding how many other animals must die to feed them.

The answer is to stop treating the ocean as an infinite warehouse of bodies.

Fish farming was sold as a way to reduce pressure on wild fish. Instead, we are contemplating a future where tens or hundreds of billions of wild fish are deliberately caught and killed every year to sustain the farms supposedly saving them. That is not a blue transformation.

It is an industrial expansion of animal exploitation dressed up in the language of sustainability.

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The UN Wants To Kill Billions More Fish To…