What is your seafood eating? Investigation traces problems in global feed supply

The following story is part of a larger investigation conducted by an international team of journalists based at The Outlaw Ocean Project, a news organization in Washington, D.C.

In 2020, a team of government investigators in Goa, India, arrived at a factory named United Marine Products to find out how it was disposing of its toxic wastewater. 

For years, local residents had complained that the factory was making their air unbreathable and their drinking water deadly. This factory produces fish meal, a protein-rich powder used to feed farmed fish, which is made by pulverizing and cooking wild-caught fish.

Soon enough, the inspectors discovered that the plant operators had employed a new and illegal way to dispose of the facility's wastewater, drilling bore holes into the ground in a field behind the plant. The authorities later concluded these holes likely contaminated groundwater and sickened villagers and livestock.

The United Marine Products plant in Councolim, Goa, India. In 2020, investigators determined the plant had drilled holes into the ground behind the plant to illegally dispose of wastewater from fish meal processing. (Changing Markets Foundation)

The plant owner denied wrongdoing.

Seafood consumers in Canada might think they have no connection to these sorts of far-away problems. 

But this factory in India supplied Skretting, a major feed producer used by dozens of fish farms in Canada — so its product may feed the salmon from British Columbia and New Brunswick or trout from Quebec you see on store shelves.

A five-year investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project, a news organization in Washington, D.C., uncovered a variety of similar hidden costs involved in producing this feed, including the loss of artisanal fishing jobs, chronic chemical exposure, avoidable worker deaths, and violent protests spurred by the horrid stench from fish meal factories. 

These social and environmental impacts exact a price primarily paid by the poorer countries where the feed ingredient is harvested and processed, far from where the resulting luxury types of seafood are eaten. 

A worker unloads a crate of anchovies from the holding area of a boat at the port of El Callao, Peru. The world’s largest producer of fishmeal, Peru faces growing concern about overfishing and pollution from its fishmeal industry. (Rodrigo Abd/The Associated Press)

Whether domestically raised or imported, the most popular types of farmed seafood consumed in Canada  – salmon, shrimp, trout, sea bass, sea bream – are fed fish meal, which is made from the very kinds of wild fish that aquaculture claims to be saving, thereby accelerating ocean depletion, say fisheries scientists.

“Any accounting of the true impact of aquaculture has to start not with the farm, but with the feed,” said Daniel Pauly, project director of the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of B.C. in Vancouver. 

“And that kind of accounting offers a very different picture than the industry offers.”

Canada’s reliance on global fish meal

Since 2022, more than half of the seafood eaten globally has come from fish farms rather than wild catch, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Aquaculture is a $444-billion industry and the fastest-growing segment of global food production. Most of these fish farms are powered by fish meal and fish oil, made from wild fish pulled from the ocean.

Unlike growing bivalves such as oysters, clams, and mussels, which do not typically require external feed, the toughest challenge to raising carnivorous seafood, such as salmon and trout, is feeding them. 

A worker drives a tractor past mounds of fish meal made from menhaden fish to be used as animal feed supplements in Reedville, Va., in 2015. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

Canada has more than 200 fish farms, most of which rely on fish meal or fish oil that, when made domestically, comes primarily from Pacific anchoveta, chub mackerel, herring, haddock, pollock, sardines, and frigate tuna. 

Canada prohibits boats targeting fish for the sole purpose of making fish meal or fish oil, so domestic fish meal is typically made using skin, bones and other byproducts of processing that would otherwise be thrown away. That’s widely viewed as a more sustainable way to produce feed protein than using whole human-edible fish. 

However, at least two-thirds of the fish meal used in Canada, primarily by aquaculture farms – roughly 53,000 tonnes in 2023 – is sourced from abroad, which ties Canadian consumers to these hidden and overseas social costs. Canada also imports more than $4 billion in seafood annually, of which a third is primarily farmed salmon and shrimp, which rely heavily on fish meal and fish oil.

Food for Feed investigation

The Outlaw Ocean Project’s five-year investigation mapped roughly the entire global fish meal industry, including more than 1,400 fish meal factories across 64 countries, tracing supply chains from fishing vessels to processing plants, feed mills, fish farms and seafood retailers. 

The reporting effort involved dozens of journalists from as many countries who visited factories and farms and boarded fish meal ships at sea. 

In Gambia and Mauritania, the investigation documented how the industry drives food insecurity as fish that once sustained local communities are diverted into fish meal factories for export.

Workers sort catch aboard the China-flagged Lu Lao Yuan Yu 010 in Gambian waters in 2019. When Outlaw Ocean reporters boarded vessels, they documented widespread complaints about poor living and working conditions. (Fábio Nascimento/The Outlaw Ocean Project)

In India and Peru, the industry was tied to at least 80 protests, some violent, in the form of labour strikes and  demonstrations sparked by the water pollution or the stench from factories cooking thousands of tonnes of decomposing fish. Canada is the largest importer of fish oil from Peru.

In China’s Xinjiang region, the reporting detailed the use of forced labour on fish farms. 

The investigation mapped more than 1,000 fish farms in Xinjiang and Tibet — two regions subjected to severe state repression — that produce an estimated half-billion dollars’ worth of farmed seafood annually, some of which is exported to the United States and Canada. 

A worker tosses fishmeal pellets into pens at a fish farm in Thailand in 2021. Over half of the seafood eaten worldwide comes from fish farms. (Mako Kurokawa)

‘Overexploited’ or worse

The investigation assessed more than 2,400 ships tied to fish meal production in at least 30 countries. It found that most of these ships do not fully comply with the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency, a guide created by ocean-focused civil society groups detailing accountability standards for industrial fishing fleets. 

For example, less than 30 per cent of the fleet had publicly available location information and less than 25 per cent had a unique vessel identification number (or ship licence plate). Such opacity makes the fleet difficult to police.

• A third of global fishing goes unreported, UBC researchers find

• Somalis say foreign ships are stealing their fish, and it's fuelling a piracy resurgence

At least half of the species landed by the assessed fish meal vessels were classified by scientific studies as “overexploited” or worse — including flat and round sardinella in Senegal, oil sardines in India, and anchoveta in Chile. 

Most of the vessels in the global fish meal fleet are purse seiners or trawlers, which deploy vast nets to capture dense schools of fish, which can indiscriminately sweep in bycatch and non-target species. 

At least 165 of the ships in the fleet were bottom trawlers, a destructive gear type that scrapes the ocean floor with weighted nets.

Fish meal reliance declining, industry says

In response to questions from The Outlaw Ocean Project about the sustainability of fish meal, the IFFO, which is the international fish meal association, emphasized that its “role is not to advise which markets should use fish meal and fish oil.”

Véronique Jamin, a spokesperson from the organization, said that fish farming is “the most efficient animal protein system” and is becoming more efficient over time.

Sacks of fish meal stored at a factory in Lima on December 3, 2009. While the aquaculture industry says it has decreased its reliance on fish meal overall, some companies have increased demand as they grow. (Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images)

In response to a question about overfishing by the fish meal industry, Jamin said, “Because small pelagics are fast-renewing stocks, their sustainable harvest threshold is much higher than for slow-growing species like cod, tuna, or deep-sea fish.”

The feed and aquaculture industries have emphasized that they are decreasing their reliance on fish meal and fish oil by adding other ingredients to the mix, such as insects, algae, and krill. Between 2000 and 2020, the share of fish meal in global aquaculture feed fell from 23 per cent to eight per cent, according to the IFFO. 

Producers of salmon, which typically requires larger amounts of fish meal and oil to thrive, say they have made progress, too. Members of the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance, which includes large producers like Cermaq and Mowi, reduced the proportion of these ingredients in salmon feed to less than 20 per cent, according to a November 2025 press release. 

“These results show salmon farming companies have adopted science-based methods that have improved the standard of salmon farm sustainability overall in Canada,” said Timothy Kennedy, president of the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance, in the release. 

A salmon farm near Campbell River, B.C., is shown during a routine health inspection in 2018. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press)

However, as aquaculture overall grows so too has demand for fish meal.

For example, to meet demand, five of the world’s largest salmon companies increased their absolute use of fish meal or fish oil made from whole wild fish by as much as 39 percent between 2020 and 2024, according to a report from the Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return Initiative. 

Two of the salmon companies that increased their absolute use of fish meal have a presence in Canada: Mowi, which announced in June 2025 that it was selling its Canadian farms to Cooke; and Grieg Seafood, whose Canadian farms have since been acquired by Cermaq. (Mowi, Cermaq, Cooke, and Grieg Seafood did not respond to a request for comment.)

Skretting opens investigation

As of 2025, there were at least seven factories processing fish meal and fish oil in Canada, and these plants are not without problems. 

Between 2021 and 2024, at least two of the plants were tied to pollution or unsustainable fishing practices, according to Bait to Plate, an online tool created by The Outlaw Ocean Project that tracks the fishing and seafood industries. Neither company responded to the project’s request for comment.

However, the far greater burden of food insecurity, collapsed fish stocks, social unrest, and air and water pollution is borne by the poorer countries that produce the fish meal or farmed seafood that Canada imports. 

For example, Canada imports over a third of its shrimp from India, where the investigation found explosions, fires, and worker asphyxiations at factories producing fish meal that supplies the country’s shrimp farms. 

Freshly caught live shrimp are seen on a shrimp farm in India, April 11, 2025. (Sahiba Chawdhary/Reuters)

As recently as 2022, United Marine Products, the Goan fish meal plant that was found to be illegally dumping wastewater, supplied fish meal to Skretting Canada, which produces feed for many of Canada’s fish farms. 

At another factory called Bismi Aquatic Products in 2021, a migrant worker died while he was cleaning a wastewater tank and passed out from the fumes. Major shrimp brands like IFC and AZ Gems, which source much of their shrimp from India, are sold across Canada at major supermarket chains like Metro Canada, Loblaws, and Costco Canada. 

Skretting has a “zero-tolerance policy” for breaches of its policies that clearly state business partners abide by all applicable laws and regulations that govern their business activities, said the company’s Sustainability and Communications Director, Jorge Diaz, and has opened an investigation to verify the information found in this reporting. 

In response to questions from Outlaw Ocean, Metro spokesperson Stephanie Bonk wrote: “All Metro suppliers are required to respect working conditions across the supply chain as outlined in our Supplier Code of Conduct for responsible procurement.” 

IFC, AZ Gems, and Loblaws did not respond to a request for comment.