Food for Feed

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.

This global transformation has rewired the trophic chain, turning farms and oceans into engineered calorie-processing systems. The natural food web, entailing 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 fueled by globally traded feed commodities such as soy and fishmeal.

This shift carries hidden costs. Feeding animals edible crops means deciding who gets calories first. As staples are routed into feed, diets, land use, and prices become governed less by local needs than by livestock cycles, global commodity markets, and export policy. Feed creates an invisible ecological dependence, letting consumption expand without the limits of nearby land or oceans being felt right away. Eating meat or farmed fish raised on feed also means drawing sustenance from distant lands, seas, and workers that consumers never see.

The socio-economic costs of producing this feed rarely show up on corporate balance sheets. They are instead absorbed by the environment and by communities far from where most of the seafood and meat are ultimately consumed. The oceans bear an especially heavy and largely invisible burden. Globally, more than a fifth of wild-caught fish is used as a feed ingredient, predominantly for aquaculture.

This investigation examines the largely unaccounted-for toll of using food for feed, focusing on one of the world’s most important feed ingredients: fishmeal.

The reporting began by identifying the locations of more than 1,400 fishmeal factories across 64 countries—facilities responsible for nearly the entire global supply of this lucrative, protein-rich, dark-yellow powder and its oil counterpart.

That global effort resulted in more than two dozen individual stories. Most of these focused on specific countries where fishmeal factories are concentrated, providing country-by-country industry assessments and plant-by-plant profiles that document crimes, regulatory violations, and other concerns.

This reporting also culminated in the creation of Bait to Plate, an interactive tool that maps the tens of thousands of supply chains underpinning much of the global aquaculture industry. The tool tracks fishmeal across five critical stages—from ship to plant to mill to farm to fork—tracing production from the fishing vessels and marine species to the brands and grocers selling farmed seafood. The tool makes it possible to precisely identify where and how crimes or other social costs enter the farmed seafood system.

Along these supply chains, the investigation documented a wide range of impacts.

The Bait to Plate tool also cataloges the marketing and certification claims of thousands of seafood, feed, and fishing companies, comparing them to reported alleged environmental and labor violations tied to their suppliers.

Aside from 20 country-specific stories, the investigation also produced a half dozen topical stories, which examined key dynamics like the use of vessels that conceal their locations at sea, the carcinogenic risks from fire retardants used in fishmeal, the economic and health impacts of factory stench, and potential pathways for reducing the global reliance on fish as livestock feed.

Launched in 2020, the Food-for-Feed investigation assembled a global network of more than two dozen journalists operating in as many countries. The reporting involved intensive, on-the-ground work:

Aside from Bait to Plate, the investigation also produced several additional tools meant to increase the transparency of our reporting and the industry: