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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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 her 2021 book The Fishmeal Revolution, Kristin A. Wintersteen traces how the Humboldt Current – a cold, nutrient-rich upwelling system along the Pacific coast of South America – was reimagined as a protein mine. That shift, she argues, turned Peru into a global fishmeal superpower, responsible for roughly a quarter of worldwide production. Fishmeal became a critical input fueling the post-World War II expansion of industrial chicken and hog farming, and later aquaculture, particularly in northern Europe and the United States. Since then, this model spread far beyond Peru, including to West Africa and Southeast Asia.
Modern aquaculture does have benefits. Fish farming provides millions of people with year-round access to affordable protein. In India, for example, aquaculture is a crucial source of jobs, especially for women. In Bangladesh, fish farming has driven an overall decline in the price of fish, making it more accessible for lower-income households. Even accounting for feed ingredients like soy and fishmeal, and transportation to the US, certain farmed fish, including tilapia and Atlantic salmon, emit less greenhouse gas per pound than beef or pork.
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Harvesting bivalves, like clams, oysters, scallops, and mussels, is an especially sustainable type of aquaculture, since these species do not require feed. This kind of farming also has a very low carbon footprint and produces shells that can function as a form of carbon capture, according to a 2020 paper by Nature Food. As of 2022, roughly a third of global aquaculture did not require external feed inputs. France is the European Union's second-largest producer of farmed seafood by volume, behind Spain, with bivalves accounting for nearly 80 percent of what the country grows.
The feed industry has emphasized that it is decreasing its reliance on fishmeal and fish oil, and especially on the use of whole fish or fish that people can eat. However, as aquaculture overall grows, so too does demand for fishmeal. The total amount of global fishmeal production is predicted to rise by nearly 10 percent, mostly from trimmings, between 2022 and 2032, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. Asked about sustainability concerns tied to her industry, Véronique Jamin, a spokesperson from IFFO, the international fishmeal association, said that fish farming is “the most efficient animal protein system". She added that her organisation's “role is not to advise which markets should use fishmeal and fish oil". “Sustainability frameworks won't work if they ignore real-world economics,” she said, and seafood companies have to respond to “what people actually want to buy and eat".
France has not only been a consumer of farmed seafood. It has also tried to help find alternatives to fishmeal. In northern France, inside a vast warehouse, millions of mealworm larvae wriggled in stacked trays at Ynsect, a company that promised to mass-produce insect protein as a replacement for fishmeal in livestock and aquaculture feed. When the firm broke ground in 2021 on what was billed as the world's largest insect farm, France's agriculture minister hailed it as a symbol of the country's “reconquest of protein sovereignty". Investors poured more than half a billion dollars into the company.
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But the fix proved harder than the pitch. By 2022, Ynsect had suffered more than $105 million in losses, largely because demand from feed buyers remained weak. In 2023, the company said it would shift away from the lower-margin business of feed for fish and farm animals, focusing instead on higher-end pet food markets. Its retreat illustrated a broader problem with alternatives to fishmeal: Even when a substitute looks promising in theory, it frequently struggles with cost, nutrition, and scale. Alternatives often lack the full range of nutrients that support the growth of farmed fish, especially omega-3. Certain “green” options, like insect meal, are expensive, and there has been limited interest among feed companies to pay a premium for them as a result.
Insects, moreover, turned out not to be as circular a solution as advertised. One of the industry's main selling points was that larvae could be raised on waste. But in the European Union, disease-prevention rules largely bar insect producers from feeding them household food waste, manure, or catering scraps. Instead, most producers must rely on feed-grade crops. As a result, a sector promoted as a way to ease pressure on oceans has, in many cases, ended up competing with people and livestock for the same agricultural resources. The lesson from Ynsect was not that replacing fishmeal is impossible. It was that there is no easy substitute waiting in the wings.
Forced labour and land appropriation
For now, the pattern persists: Wild fish are caught and rendered into feed, while the costs of this production are left elsewhere. And reporting across several continents and oceans showed just how varied those costs can be. In Chile, several hundred protesters burned tires and blocked coastal highways and railway tracks while demonstrating against the early closure of the fishing season, a move partly driven by overfishing tied to fishmeal. In Russia, fish processing workers were held captive in secluded company towns in remote parts of the country, or stuck on ships far from shore. “People have nowhere to go, no money,” one worker said in a plea to Vladimir Putin, who participated in an episode of a call-in television show about the fishmeal plant. “Please, help us,” a second worker said. 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.
The investigation also unveiled the hidden role of forced labour and land appropriation in China's growing aquaculture industry. In 2025, France imported more than $124 million worth of seafood from China, which is rapidly expanding its aquaculture industry. China now raises more than four times the amount of fish it catches. One of the fastest-growing regions in this boom is China's mountainous and desert inland west, particularly Tibet and Xinjiang, two regions known for intense political repression.
In Tibet, the Chinese government has relocated roughly half a million Tibetans, leveling villages and monasteries for development projects such as hydroelectric dams and fish farms. This effort often uses coercive tactics, including repeated home visits, threats of criminal prosecution, and warnings that utilities could be cut off for those who refused to move, according to a 2024 Human Rights Watch report. In response to these sorts of policies, at least 169 Tibetans have set themselves on fire, typically on camera, outside police stations, monasteries, or public squares. In Xinjiang, more than a million people have been held in detention camps, and the government has engaged in large-scale land seizures, forced sterilizations, and criminal penalties for speaking native languages or practicing religious and cultural traditions.
The investigation mapped more than 1,000 fish farms in Xinjiang and Tibet that produce an estimated half-billion dollars' worth of farmed seafood annually, much of which is exported to more than a dozen countries, including the United States. China's effort to promote fish farming in Tibet and Xinjiang is partly facilitated by severe state repression, including the widespread appropriation of land, intense police surveillance, and the incarceration of tens of thousands of local residents. The United States bans all goods produced “wholly or in part” by workers in Xinjiang or by ethnic minorities from the region on the presumption that they were made with state-sponsored forced labor. No such law exists for Tibet. EU law, which applies in France, does not single out China but prohibits products made with forced labor from being placed or made available on the EU market, including imports.
Sustainability smokescreens
As the production of seafood has become more globalised, its supply chains have stretched longer, and it has become tougher for consumers to know whether it was harvested sustainably or legally. Most grocers who sell seafood are in the dark as well because tracking is difficult and costly. Robert K. Stumberg, professor at Georgetown Law and supply-chain expert, said this is partly because grocers typically buy from wholesalers and rarely track their suppliers. The other reason may be plausible deniability, he added. “Companies can escape blame or the need to fix problems if they're unaware of them.”
Where government regulators have proven lacking in ensuring that supply chains are free from unsustainable, illegal, or unethical practices, industry-led certification programs have sought to fill the gap. Critics say these programmes serve more as a sustainability smokescreen, giving downstream customers a way to avoid looking deeper into their supply chains. The programmes generally focus on environmental crimes, while mostly overlooking labour abuses on ships. Their biggest weakness, according to researchers, is that they do not actually track seafood fully, which results in false reassurances for consumers.
Allie Brudney, a senior staff attorney at the strategic litigation non-profit group Corporate Accountability Lab, said that on land – at processing plants or on farms – certification programmes rarely conduct true spot checks to authenticate the guarantees given by managers at the factories. Instead, the programmes frequently alert companies before inspectors show up, which gives them a chance to clean up the scene so there are no violations. At sea, these programmes also often rely on self-reported information from ship captains rather than having auditors directly visit and check conditions offshore on vessels, where crimes are most common. Certification programmes are rife with conflicts of interest, since they are typically funded by the companies that they are supposed to police, Brudney added.
The various organisations that make up the certification industry emphasize that each plays its own role and cannot be held accountable for others' responsibilities. For example, Devan Meserve, a spokesperson for The Global Seafood Alliance, which runs a programme called Best Aquaculture Practices, said that her organisation represents the “most comprehensive programme for farmed seafood", partially because it covers the “entire aquaculture production chain". Protecting workers on the fishing vessels that supply feed mills is, however, an “immense challenge", she noted, because audits occur strictly at port and do not witness harvest conditions. Meserve added that her organisation helps the industry counter illegal and overfishing by requiring feed mills to source most of the fish they use in fishmeal or fish oil from fisheries accredited by certification programmes like MarinTrust and Marine Stewardship Council.
Partly bolstered by these certification programmes, seafood companies routinely make marketing claims about the ethics and sustainability of their seafood. Often, these claims fail to reckon with crimes or social concerns further up their supply chains, including on the ships or plants that produce the feed for the fish farms. This disconnect is creating growing legal risk for seafood companies and grocers. Since 2020, at least nine lawsuits alleging false advertising have been brought against six seafood companies across six US jurisdictions. The legal complaints focused on a common pattern: marketing claims that portrayed products as sustainable or ethically sourced, paired with supply chain evidence that suggested otherwise. Plaintiffs challenged language such as “sustainable", “eco-friendly", “all-natural", “wild-caught,” and “from the coast of Maine", as well as claims of superior worker-safety standards.
In at least four cases, the use of fishmeal or fish oil and their link to industrial fishing and ecosystem depletion were central to arguments that the products were not environmentally sustainable. Additional allegations included forced labour on fishing vessels and reliance on harmful pesticides and antibiotics. During this same period, seafood companies have paid more than $2 million in settlement fees to resolve false-advertising cases. The Outlaw Ocean investigation assessed more than 800 seafood companies that made marketing claims comparable to – or stronger than – those cited in the lawsuits and found that over half of the companies had documented crimes or concerns within their supply chains.
Dana Cleaveley, a research consultant formerly with the Canadian sustainable seafood group SeaChoice, said many industries have already had to begin reckoning with the human rights and environmental abuses buried in their supply chains. She cited sweatshop garments, blood diamonds, and fair-trade coffee as examples. Seafood, she said, has been slower to face that kind of scrutiny. But as the world searches for more protein and leans further into aquaculture, that may change, particularly if more governments begin restricting imports tied to illegality or unsustainable practices. “That's when investors will begin to see material, not just reputational, risk,” she said, “and companies will have to adjust".
The reporting for this story was part of a larger investigation conducted by an international team of journalists based at The Outlaw Ocean Project.