France’s seafood problem starts elsewhere

On March 6, 2024, Pascal Goumain, the president of Saumon de France, was presenting his company’s salmon pens in Cherbourg as part of France’s food future. In an interview, Goumain described plans to adapt the farm to climate change and pointed to official backing for expansion. “The French Ministry of Agriculture set an objective to farm 20,000 tonnes of salmon in France by 2030,” Goumain said. The promise of fish farming, he argued, is that it is both sustainable and important for food sovereignty.

“We should be a leading aquaculture country,” he said, “but we’re falling behind.” The industry and government pitch of aquaculture in France has been straightforward: People want more seafood, the limit of what can be viably pulled from the wild is quickly being reached, and fish farming is the way to meet the growing demand while slowing the collapse of the oceans. “The quantities caught are not sufficient to feed consumers,” former minister of the sea Annick Girardin said in 2021.

The Haut-Commissariat au Plan on fish farming echoed the point in 2023, asserting that in a context of climate change and overfishing, the “responsible development” of aquaculture could expand supply without undermining the fishing sector. Globally, the ocean-sustainability argument for fish farming – “grow more, so we can catch less” – is one of the reasons that the $313-billion aquaculture industry is currently the fastest-growing food sector, and why half of the seafood eaten around the world is now farm-raised rather than caught at sea.

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 There is a problem, though. “The aquaculture industry’s sales pitch is flat wrong,” said Daniel Pauly, project director of the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia. The most popular types of farmed seafood consumed in France – salmon, shrimp, trout, sea bass, sea bream – are fed the kinds of wild fish that aquaculture claims to be saving, thereby accelerating ocean depletion, not slowing it, he explained.

Two-thirds of global aquaculture grows species that are fed fishmeal and fish oil, ingredients made by cooking and pulverising wild-caught fish. Before it reaches market, a farmed salmon, for instance, eats at some farms more than six times its weight in wild-caught fish. To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. Accept Manage my choices One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading.

To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Try again Cover image: India: the ‘shrimp empire’ and a symbol of the excesses of aquaculture. © Outlaw Ocean Project 10:43 The concerns about aquaculture extend far beyond the fate of the oceans. The feed that powers most of this industry comes with a huge variety of other hidden costs, according to a wide-reaching investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project , a news organization based in Washington, DC.

These costs include the loss of artisanal fishing jobs, chronic chemical exposure, avoidable worker deaths, violent protests typically spurred by the horrid stench from fishmeal factories, and escalating geopolitical tensions as countries compete for scarce sources of protein. What economists often call “externalities", 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 seafood is eaten.

In Gambia and Mauritania , the investigation documented how the industry drives food insecurity as fish that once sustained local communities are increasingly being diverted into fishmeal factories for export. In remote islands in Russia’s far east and in China’s Xinjiang region, the reporting detailed the use of forced labor on ships, on farms, and in factories. In other countries, like India and Peru , this industry was tied to at least 80 incidents of civil unrest, some of them violent, usually in the form of labour strikes and community protests sparked by the water pollution or the stench from factories cooking thousands of tons of decomposing fish.

Workers carry crates of fish to shore in Gunjur, The Gambia, in 2019. Much of this same catch previously provided an affordable source of protein for local communities, but the higher prices fishmeal plants offer have since redirected the catch into the export market. © Fábio Nascimento, The Outlaw Ocean Project The four-year investigation mapped roughly the entire global fishmeal industry, including more than 1,400 fishmeal 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, visiting factories and farms and boarding fishmeal ships at sea. The goal was to chronicle what economists call this industry’s “externalities” – the hidden and displaced social costs of producing this feed that rarely appear on the balance sheets of the seafood companies that depend on it. To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement.

Accept Manage my choices One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Try again Cover image: In Senegal, a lost generation in the face of the excesses of aquaculture © Outlaw ocean project 21:24 The investigation revealed that the fishmeal industry also contributes to geopolitical tensions. For example, in 2021, a dozen Turkish bottom trawlers fishing illegally in the Aegean Sea tried to ram a Greek research vessel when the scientists began filming their activity.

In 2018, riots broke out in Saint-Louis, Senegal , after a fisher was shot and killed by Mauritanian coast guards, during what the Mauritanians said was a cross-border raid by a fishmeal boat. Since the mid-1970s, Morocco has militarily occupied Western Sahara , a presence that more than 10 EU Court of Justice rulings and various UN resolutions have deemed illegal. Still, Moroccan ships routinely fish in Western Saharan waters, turning their illegal catch into fishmeal in Western Saharan plants, then exporting it to farms globally labeled as Moroccan.

A violent clash over trucks, many of them carrying this fish and fishmeal out of Western Sahara , led to the collapse of a 29-year ceasefire between the countries in 2020. As recently as 2024, a Western Saharan fishmeal plant supplied fish oil to a French importer named S.A.S. Ch. Daudruy Van Cauwenberghe & Fils, which advertises supplements for animal feed on its website, according to Bait to Plate , an online tool that maps seafood supply chains.

S.A.S. Ch. Daudruy Van Cauwenberghe & Fils did not respond to a request for comment. Read more The Saya de Malha Bank, a 'forgotten ecosystem' in need of protection France’s greatest exposure to these problems comes less from home-grown salmon than from the more than €6 billion worth of seafood the country imports annually, including shrimp, trout, tilapia, and other forms of fish that rely heavily on fishmeal and fish oil. For example, shrimp raised on farms in Ecuador and sold at major grocers in France such as E.LeClerc, Cora, and Carrefour is fed fishmeal from plants throughout Latin America that have been tied to at least five worker deaths, 20 cases of illegal fishing, and over a half dozen instances of civil unrest from neighbours protesting the stench from fishmeal factories, the investigation found.

Carrefour Group , which also owns Cora, said it was immediately launching an investigation into the issues concerning its supply chain and “will take all necessary measures in the event of confirmed non-compliance", which could include the exclusion of sources of supply “that do not meet our ethical and environmental standards". E.Leclerc did not respond to a request for comment. More than sixty percent of the salmon eaten in France comes from farms in Norway , which rely heavily on imported fish feed made from wild-caught fish.

The feed raising this salmon is linked to a range of documented impacts, including food insecurity in Western Africa, pollution from waste and chemicals, and the spread of parasites and disease to wild fish populations. A 2024 Science Advances review found that about 87 percent of global fishmeal goes to aquaculture, compared with roughly seven percent to pigs and about five percent to poultry. The oceans bear an especially heavy and largely invisible burden from the fishmeal and fish oil industry.

More than a fifth of wild-caught fish around the world is used for non-human consumption, in particular as feed for fish, chickens, and pigs. The investigation assessed more than 2,400 ships tied to fishmeal production, operating in the waters of 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 leading ocean-focused civil society groups detailing accountability standards for industrial fishing fleets.

For example, less than 30 percent of the fleet had publicly available location information, and less than 25 percent had a unique vessel identification number, or ship license plate. Such opacity makes the fleet difficult to police. Scientific studies classified at least half of the species landed by the assessed fishmeal vessels as “overexploited” or worse. Most of the vessels in this fleet are purse seiners or trawlers, which deploy vast nets to capture dense schools of fish.

Both gear types are associated with high levels of waste, routinely hauling in large volumes of bycatch and non-target species. At least 165 of the ships in the global fishmeal fleet were bottom trawlers, conducting a particularly destructive form of fishing that uses weighted nets that scrape the ocean floor, destroying virtually everything in their paths. The problem of unsustainable fishing is compounded by heavy government subsidies that keep too many vessels operating, accelerating pressure on already stressed fisheries.

“Any accounting of the true impact of aquaculture has to start not with the farm, but with the feed,” said Pauly. “And that kind of accounting offers a very different picture than the industry offers.” Natural food web 'now shaped by industrial design' For most of human history, we ate what ecosystems produced on their own: wild fish, grazing animals, and crops grown for people. Livestock survived largely on grass and agricultural leftovers that humans didn’t eat.

Today, we do something different: We grow or catch food that people could eat and feed it to animals instead, especially in industrial livestock and fish farming. These calories are converted before they’re consumed. Read more Posidonia meadows: Lungs of the seas at risk This global transformation has rewired the trophic chain, turning farms and oceans into engineered calorie-processing systems. The natural food web, consisting of who eats what and how energy moves from plants to animals to humans, is no longer mainly determined by ecosystems.

It’s now shaped by industrial design. Animals have become less like savings accounts that turn waste into food, and more like biological factories steered by globally traded feed commodities such as soy and fishmeal. Roughly 90 percent of the catch used to produce fishmeal globally is edible for humans, according to a 2017 study published in the Fish and Fisheries journal. Most fishmeal plants around the world rely on whole fish rather than processing waste or inedible byproducts, further intensifying local protein scarcity.

The science of animal feed – combining corn, soy, grains, and ingredients like fishmeal to raise livestock faster, more efficiently, and at a larger scale – has been central to the rise of modern civilisation. Techniques of animal husbandry emerged roughly 12,000 years ago in the so-called Fertile Crescent, a region stretching from Mesopotamia to Egypt. Alongside innovations such as irrigation and the plough, the domestication of livestock enabled humans to build stable food systems, settle permanently, and eventually develop cities.

As farming shifted from grazing animals on open land to penning them, humans assumed responsibility for providing balanced diets, an early precursor to today’s industrial feed systems. In