Canada: The Hidden Costs of Feeding Farmed Fish
In June 2024, the Canadian government announced a ban on a certain type of salmon farming in British Columbia waters. Widely celebrated in the press, the prohibition on so-called “open net-pen” farming represented a “transformative shift” that would “make Canada a world leader in sustainable aquaculture production,” according to a press release from Taleeb Noormohamed, a lawmaker from Vancouver Granville.1
Open-net farms raise salmon in cages submerged in the ocean.2 They allow currents to pass through the nets, delivering oxygen and clearing waste. But these pens are also seen by researchers, food safety experts, and marine advocates as cruel and dangerous. They cause mass die-offs as salmon sometimes choke on their own feces or are crushed by overcrowding. They endanger food and environmental safety by spreading lice and disease from farmed fish to wild fish.
The prohibition on these pens “ensures the protection of wild species, food security and the vital economic development of British Columbia’s First Nations,” said Diane Lebouthillier, former minister of fisheries, oceans, and the Canadian Coast Guard.3 When the ban takes effect in 2029, much of the salmon industry in Canada is expected to shift to either a marine “closed-containment” approach, which keeps salmon in floating cages separated from the ocean by an impermeable barrier, or a land-based “closed-containment” approach, which entails raising the fish onshore in tanks or ponds.4
The problem was that Canada’s celebrated ban overlooked a far bigger global concern tied to farmed salmon. Regardless of how the fish is housed, aquaculture salmon is almost always raised using fishmeal, which is a dark-yellow, protein-rich powder made by cooking and pulverizing wild-caught fish.5 And this type of feed comes with a variety of hidden costs for the world’s oceans.
A major cost of fishmeal is its impact on food security in lower-income countries where it is caught and processed—including in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia—robbing their coastal communities of livelihoods and affordable protein sources. Despite the fishmeal industry’s claims about the benefits of aquaculture, “On net, it is very clear that the industry destroys food. It’s not feeding the world, but actually destroying people,” said Spencer Roberts, one of the authors of a study published in 2024 in Science Advances.6 Worse still, he added, it is taking food from Global South countries and converting it into something else that gets fed to Global North countries.7 A third of the world’s stocks were overfished as of 2024.8
Global demand for fishmeal skyrocketed, especially since the early 2000s, primarily because it is used as a protein-rich supplement in the booming industry of fish farming, or aquaculture, which is the planet’s fastest-growing food sector.9 Over half of the seafood eaten worldwide comes from fish farms, most of them powered by fishmeal and fish oil.10 Producers of fishmeal and fish oil are sometimes referred to as the “reduction industry,” a $6 billion sector that catches wild fish, like menhaden, anchovies, krill, and sardines, and then “reduces” them to powder, pellets, or oil, mostly fed to higher-priced fish in captivity bound for seafood buyers.11 The practice of catching food to feed food is highly wasteful in terms of the energy loss and use of the planet’s resources, said Karen Luyckx, an independent researcher who specializes in food systems. “If we want to feed a growing global population well and sustainably, we must stop catching wild fish to feed farmed fish.”12
Dive deeper — 1 of 3 in this report — Footnotes 13–36
Why the Sea Became A Protein Mine
The science of animal feed—combining corn, soy, grain, and other ingredients like fishmeal to raise livestock faster, more efficiently, and at a larger scale—was central to the rise of modern civilization.13 Techniques of animal husbandry developed roughly 12,000 years ago in the so-called “Fertile Crescent,” an ancient area stretching from Mesopotamia to Egypt.14 Alongside advancements like irrigation and the plough, the domestication of livestock was essential for humans to create the stable food supply that they needed to settle and eventually to develop cities.15 Shifting from grazing to penning animals required farmers to provide them with balanced diets.16
Historically, marine life itself has experienced a conceptual shift. First, these creatures were animals that served mostly as sustenance for seabirds, marine mammals, and larger predatory fish, and, on a local scale, as food for humans. Next, they were seafood to be eaten by humans on an industrial and global scale. Then, with the rise of the reduction industry, marine creatures emerged as an ingredient in the form of flour, oil, or protein, destined as livestock feed.17 Ocean habitats became calorie factories.
Kristin A. Wintersteen explains how and when the modern world began using the sea as a protein mine.18 In her 2021 book, The Fishmeal Revolution, she chronicles how the Humboldt Current, a cold, nutrient-rich upwelling system that runs along the Pacific coast of South America, was reconceptualized from being a living marine ecosystem into a place to extract raw materials. This “revolution,” she explained, converted Peru into the fishmeal superpower it is today, now accounting for roughly a quarter of global production. This historical transformation made fishmeal the key ingredient that helped fuel the post-World War II expansion of industrial chicken, hog, and later fish farming—especially in the US and northern Europe. This shift, which has since extended far beyond the waters of Peru to include the coastline of West Africa, has also severed consumers from the ecological and human costs of production.19
Fishmeal and its rise as a staple feedstock have come with a variety of hidden costs that rarely show up on the balance sheets of the seafood companies that rely on it. These hidden costs, or what economists call “externalities,” are instead paid by the environment and by people who are far from where the seafood gets eaten.20 The oceans also pay an especially heavy and unseen toll from this industry. More than a fifth of all marine life pulled out of the water globally was swallowed up by the feed industry in 2022, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).21 Reduction fishing often relies on purse-seine or trawl nets that can trap large amounts of non-target fish, or bycatch, significantly impacting the ecosystem by removing key prey species.22 As such, the reduction industry represents a stark example of “fishing down the food web,” where fishing shifts toward smaller, less valuable species as larger, predatory fish stocks decline. The true cost of farmed fish is not what appears on the restaurant menu or the grocery store packaging.
Most fishmeal is used by the aquaculture industry. This is ironic since, historically, the global push toward aquaculture has been bolstered by the idea that farming fish on land lessens the need to take so many from the sea. Using fishmeal to feed fish farms, however, has turned this goal upside down, and fish farming is accelerating ocean depletion. The toughest challenge to farming carnivorous fish is feeding them. Food constitutes roughly 70 percent of this industry’s overhead, and so far, the only commercially viable form is fishmeal.23 The aquaculture farms that yield some of the most popular seafood, such as salmon, tuna, shrimp, carp, or European sea bass, often consume more fish than they ship to supermarkets and restaurants.24 Before it gets to market, a farm-raised tuna, for example, can eat more than 15 times its weight in free-roaming fish that has been converted into fishmeal.25M
Aquaculture has existed in rudimentary forms for centuries before it became industrialized on a large scale in the 1980s, and it has some clear benefits. Fish farming provides millions of people with year-round access to affordable protein.26 In India, aquaculture is a crucial source of jobs, especially for women.27 In Bangladesh, fish farming has driven an overall decline in the price of fish, making it more accessible for lower-income households.28 Even when feed—including ingredients like soy and fishmeal—and transport to the US are taken into account, some types of fish farming, such as tilapia and Atlantic salmon aquaculture, have lower greenhouse gas emissions per pound compared to beef and pork.29 Farming bivalves, including clams, oysters, scallops, and mussels, is particularly sustainable: These species typically require no feed and use minimal land and freshwater.30 They also produce shells that can function as a form of carbon capture, according to a 2020 Nature Food study.31 As of 2022, roughly a third of global aquaculture did not require external feed inputs.32
Fish In:Fish Out
It can take more than 730 wild-caught Peruvian anchoveta to grow a single farmed salmon.
Wild anchoveta needed per farmed animalMEvery mark is one anchoveta, at one size
730anchoveta 1 Salmon
390anchoveta 1 Trout
3anchoveta 1 Carp
1anchoveta 1 Shrimp
As the planet’s population has grown, so too has competition for key nutrients. Countries are struggling to reduce their reliance on imported meat in a bid toward “protein sovereignty.”33 Investors are chasing alternative protein sources like plant-based or lab-cultivated meat. Disruptions such as the avian flu and the Russia-Ukraine War have led to sharp jumps in meat prices, casting new focus on the interconnectedness and volatility of these commodity markets. “With increasing frequency, wealthy, food-importing countries and private investors are acquiring farmland overseas,” said a report from the Wilson International Center titled “Land Grab? The Race for the World’s Farmland,” explaining that many of these purchases are for the sake of growing more food.34
In the context of this global fight for prized resources, feed represents a hidden battle behind the broader war. Competition is especially fierce for crops, particularly soy, that are fed to livestock. “China, the US, and Brazil are the world’s three largest producers of meat by far, and they all rely on and are bound together by one commodity: the soybean,” said a 2024 podcast by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.35 “In 2024, US-China trade tensions are mostly centered on high-tech products like semiconductors or critical minerals. But in 2018, one of the first battlegrounds for these superpowers was the soybean.”36 As with soy, the scramble for fishmeal and fish oil is fueled by the same geopolitical desires for sovereignty and control over vital resources. And yet, this contest is happening not on land but at sea, where there is far less focus from journalists, governments, and environmental or human rights advocates.
Much of the fishmeal used by Canadian fish farms was sourced from abroad. Canada imported more than 55,000 tons of fishmeal in 2024.37 Canada also produces some of its own fishmeal.M As of 2025, at least seven plants in Canada were processing fishmeal and its liquid equivalent, fish oil. Four of these plants were located on the Atlantic coast, two on the Pacific coast, and one on the Hudson Bay. Two of the plants, both on the Atlantic coast, exported fish oil.M
Fishmeal Plants in Canada
Canadian plants processing fishmeal have been implicated in a variety of problems. Between 2021 and 2024, at least two Canadian fishmeal plants were reportedly tied to crimes or concerns relating to pollution or unsustainable fishing practices, according to news reports, government documents, trade records, and court filings compiled in Bait to Plate, a tool created by The Outlaw Ocean Project that tracks the world’s fishing and seafood industries.38M This included one plant at the center of pollution complaints, including allegations of emitting a smell that local news coverage described as being “rancid, fishy, bloody, sour, and chemical.”39M Another plant was reported to process fish species described by Fisheries and Oceans Canada as being in the “critical zone,” a state of heavy depletion.40M
- Pacific anchoveta (Engraulis mordax)Source
- Sardines (Sardinops sagax)Source
- Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus)Source
- Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii)Source
- Haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus)Source
- Pollock (Pollachius virens)Source
The stench from the plants is more than just a nuisance for people living nearby. It corrodes the local economy by undercutting tourism and scaring away restaurant patrons and beach visitors. The foul smell is also an indicator of the release of noxious chemicals like ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, cyanide, and methane, which have been known to contribute to higher levels of serious health problems, including nausea, pulmonary edema, and even death among plant workers and neighbors.41 The worst part of the odor comes from trimethylamine, or TMA, a colorless gas characterized by a “fishy” smell. In 2021, the Society of Chemical Industry identified TMA as “strongly toxic and carcinogenic.”42 More than 31,000 people, over 5,300 of them under the age of 15, live within a mile of fishmeal plants in Canada, according to The Outlaw Ocean Project’s Bait-to-Plate tool.43M
People living near some of Canada’s plants have complained about this stench. One resident described the “eye-watering stench” from the West Coast Reduction fishmeal plant in North Vancouver in a February 2021 post on a neighborhood blog.44M That May, officials from the plant announced that they were renewing their air quality permit and requesting an increase in their allowed emissions.45 Many locals were displeased and collected over 750 signatures on a petition aiming to block the plant permit renewal.46M
The residents were not wrong to raise concerns about air quality around the factory. Nitrogen oxides accounted for over half of the gases released by the plant, 24 tons being emitted in 2023, according to a report by Canada’s national pollutant release inventory tied to the West Coast Reduction plant in North Vancouver.47M These gases can have “adverse effects on respiratory systems of humans and animals” and cause damage to vegetation, while contributing to the acidification of aquatic ecosystems, a 2013 article by Environment and Climate Change Canada said.48 West Coast Reduction did not respond to requests for comment.49
Dive deeper — 2 of 3 in this report — Footnotes 50–70
Fishmeal Sustainability: Walking North on a Southbound Train
The fishmeal industry and aquaculture industries have made a variety of arguments about their sustainability. For example, the IFFO, which is the international fishmeal association, has emphasized that its “role is not to advise which markets should use fishmeal and fish oil.”50 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, not less: lower inclusion rates of fishmeal/oil, higher digestibility of alternative ingredients, better feed formulation through precision nutrition.”51 She added: “Sustainability frameworks won’t work if they ignore real-world economics,” and seafood companies have to respond to “what people actually want to buy and eat.”52
Ocean researchers and marine historians, however, offer a different view about global demand for fishmeal and farmed fish.53 First, they contend that it was the aquaculture industry itself that is driving increased demand for farmed fish. "Classic market economics explains that making a resource cheaper and more efficient does not curb its use; it increases it," said a 2026 report by the Aquaculture Accountability Project. "Instead of meeting a preexisting need, confining hundreds of thousands or millions of fish in net pens to produce cheap seafood has created what economists call ‘supply-driven demand.’”54 A 2024 study by Science Advances furthered this point: Aquaculture companies have “driven an increase in demand for salmon, rather than having simply met a pre-existing demand.” The research concluded that the aquaculture industry has exponentially increased the supply of affordable “premium” fish like salmon, leading to higher demand, the opposite of its claim to be meeting an existing need.55
In defense of its sustainability, the feed industry has also emphasized that it is decreasing its reliance on fishmeal and fish oil, and especially on the use of whole fish or fish that can be eaten by people. Over 58 percent of fishmeal and fish oil globally comes from whole fish in 2026, according to international fishmeal association data. At least 90 percent of the fresh fish turned into fishmeal and fish oil is food-grade, edible to humans, according to a 2017 study published in the Fish and Fisheries journal. The IFFO has said on its website that between 2000 and 2020, the proportion of fishmeal in aquaculture feed at fish farms globally decreased from 23 percent to eight percent.56 Some experts have predicted, however, that the total amount of global fishmeal production could rise by nearly 10 percent between 2022 and 2032, mostly from trimmings—fish offcuts not suitable for human consumption—according to the FAO.57 Overall demand for fishmeal also seems to be increasing.58 Five of the world’s largest salmon companies, for instance, increased their absolute use of fishmeal and 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.59
Meanwhile, global fishmeal supplies could be tapped out as soon as 2028, according to Novel Sharma, a Rabobank analyst specializing in seafood and aquaculture.60 “A shortage is inevitable,” the report said.61 This means that the industry's claims about the supply, demand, and sustainability of fishmeal require broader context. While individual sectors or companies may be decreasing their use of fishmeal, the overall industry is not likely decreasing at a rate that makes it sustainable. The industry’s claims, then, resemble someone walking north on a southbound train: Individual actors may be moving in the right direction, but not nearly fast enough to change the outcome.
Assessing the climate impact of carnivorous fish farming is also complicated.62 The industry markets aquaculture seafood as a climate-friendly protein source.63 However, its true carbon cost is sometimes obscured by selective accounting, particularly the omission of fishmeal production, which accounts for at least half of industry emissions.64 Comparing the climate impact of food per pound can also make farmed fish appear artificially more efficient, but one pound of water-dense cod provides only a third of the calories of one pound of pork, distorting the reality of consumption.65 Meanwhile, over 165 million metric tons of CO2—equivalent to the annual emissions from all passenger cars in the UK—have been released into the atmosphere as mangroves and seagrass beds have been destroyed to make way for the global expansion of coastal fish farms, further undermining long-term carbon storage.66 When emissions from fishmeal, habitat loss, and global supply chains are accounted for, catfish and other intensive aquaculture products can rival or exceed poultry and pork in total climate impact, according to a 2018 Science study.67
Bill McKibben, a climate-change expert and author of Here Comes the Sun, said that hope is not lost, especially looking at promising trends tied to even some of the most intransigent global systems like fossil fuels.68 Between 2022 and 2024, the world nearly doubled its solar power capacity from two to three terawatts, and it was on track to increase by another three terawatts by the end of 2026. As of 2025, solar was growing faster than any other power source in history. The shift was largely driven by developments in the 2020s that enabled solar power, for the first time, to become cheaper than fossil fuels. China, Pakistan, and several countries across Africa led the charge to divest from distant supplies of oil and natural gas and take up local supplies of sun and wind.69 “If it can happen with energy, it can happen with food,” McKibben explained, adding that a relocalization of aquaculture, which pushes toward sustainable species like mollusks and away from those that rely on feed sources like fishmeal, is possible if international demand for things like salmon or shrimp decreases.70
Canada prohibits boats targeting fish for the sole purpose of making fishmeal.71 Therefore, the fishmeal produced in Canada is typically made by processing inedible parts of fish that would otherwise be thrown away. Fishmeal in Canada comes from Pacific anchoveta, chub mackerel, herring, haddock, pollock, sardines, and frigate tuna.72M
Canadian fishing companies have historically benefited from government support. Canada gave at least $800 million in harmful subsidies to its fishing industry in 2018, according to a study by the University of British Columbia.73 Fishing subsidies are controversial because many researchers say that they can put too many fishing ships on the water, which accelerates overfishing. Governments around the world took one step toward ending this practice when an agreement on fisheries subsidies passed by the World Trade Organization (WTO), of which Canada is a member, entered into force in 2025. Under this agreement, member states agreed to prohibit subsidies that contributed to unregulated or illegal fishing and the targeting of overfished stocks.74
The health of Canada’s fisheries and the burden of overfishing are ongoing concerns. Between 2020 and 2025, conservationists, environmental groups, and coastal First Nations called for an indefinite moratorium on herring fisheries in British Columbia.75 They said the harvest rates set by the Fisheries and Oceans Department were unsustainable and blamed the federal agency for systematically mismanaging stocks, causing the fish’s decline.76
Other stakeholders have also fought over how these stocks are managed. In 2025, in a joint declaration, six hereditary chiefs called for a 20-year moratorium on herring fishing in the Strait of Georgia, pointing to a 60 percent decline in local populations between 2016 and 2020.77 Three months later, Canadian fishery authorities increased the Pacific herring quota in the Strait of Georgia to almost 11,000 tons.78 The British Columbia Seafood Alliance endorsed this decision.79
Canadian authorities closed the Atlantic mackerel fishery in 2022.80 The species was “in the critical zone,” Canadian fishery authorities said in a news release.81 Oceana Canada said that the decision followed a decade of mismanagement in which the government set the fishing quota at 10 times the scientific advice.82 In 2024, FFAW-Unifor, a fishers’ labor union, called for an extension of the mackerel bait fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador, pointing to evidence that stocks were healthier in these areas.83M
On March 19, 2021, a fishing vessel illegally dumped a load of herring in Deep Bay off the coast of British Columbia after a carrier vessel refused the catch because the fish were too small and much of the catch consisted of juveniles.84 The discarded fish carpeted the seafloor by the dock and prompted an investigation by Canada’s fisheries department.85 A veteran herring fisherman dismissed the incident, telling a local paper that this practice was a normal part of cleaning and unloading.86 But conservationists said this practice of dumping unmarketable fish was “wasteful and unsustainable,” and called for the herring fishery to be shut down entirely.87M
In Canada, herring is a traditional source of bait for many commercial fisheries, including lobster, snow crab, and halibut. Fishing companies also harvest herring roe, exporting it—usually in smoked, marinated, pickled, cured, canned, fresh, or frozen form—to Japan, the United States, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere.88 The health of this fish stock in the waters bordering Canada has struggled. Many Pacific and several Atlantic herring fisheries were closed in 2022 in Canada due to low stock numbers.89 In the Bay of Fundy and on the Scotian Shelf, the total allowable catch of Atlantic herring was reduced by 33 percent in 2022.90 That year, Oceana Canada urged the Canadian government to update the country’s Fisheries Act and expand its regulations for the sake of helping to restore depleted stocks of the types of fish targeted by fishmeal boats.91 The organization argued that these species played a crucial role in maintaining a healthy marine ecosystem.92
Dive deeper — 3 of 3 in this report — Footnotes 93–114
Certification & The Growing Risk of False Advertising
As the production of seafood has become more globalized, its supply chains have stretched longer, and it has become tougher for consumers to know how it was produced and whether it was harvested sustainably, safely, legally, or ethically.93 Most grocers who sell the seafood are in the dark as well. Partly, because tracking seafood is unusually difficult and costly. The other reason may be plausible deniability. Companies can escape blame or the need to fix problems if they are unaware of them.
Where government regulators in Canada have proven lacking in managing fish stocks, industry-led certification programs have sought to fill the gap. These programs claim to provide assurances that the supply chains connecting Canada’s fishmeal industry to seafood buyers elsewhere in the world are free from ships or plants that engage in unsustainable, illegal, or unethical practices.M But critics say that these programs serve as sustainability smokescreens because their purview is not broad enough. As a result, questionable practices farther up the supply chain get overlooked.94
Various researchers and advocates have concluded that seafood certification programs suffer from systemic flaws. For instance, Allie Brudney, a senior staff attorney at Corporate Accountability Lab, a strategic litigation non-profit organization, said that on land, at processing plants, or on farms, certification programs rarely conduct true spot checks to authenticate the reassurances given by managers at the factories.95 Instead, the programs 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 programs 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. The programs are rife with conflicts of interest, since they are typically funded by the companies that they are supposed to police, Brudney added.96
Certification programs also do not track seafood fully through the entire supply chain, which can result in inaccurate reassurances for consumers. “Without the chain of custody, standards are not able to provide an assurance to organisational buyers and consumers that the fish they are buying was caught in the socially responsible way they are purporting,” according to a 2022 study by the University of Nottingham.97M To properly trace aquaculture seafood would require knowing not just what happens at the fish farm but what goes into the feed supplied to the farm. This would entail following fishmeal and fish oil through five stages: from ship to plant to mill to farm to fork. Usually, a ship catches the fish that gets sent to the plant that turns it into oil, powder, or pellets.M The fishmeal is then sent to a mill, where it is mixed with other ingredients, like soy, wheat, and canola meal, to become “compound feed.”98 Next, the feed gets distributed to fish farms that grow the seafood, which is finally dispatched to grocery stores, restaurant chains, or food service companies. Many of these problems have been highlighted by academic and NGO studies, including a 2020 report by Changing Markets Foundation and a 2020 report by the University of Groningen.99
Skepticism
Food safety is another concern tied to the lack of seafood tracing. Food writer Michael Pollan said that aside from climate change and sustainability concerns, there are also intense food-safety problems buried within feed. “We are what we eat, but that’s only part of the story,” he said. “We are what what we eat eats too.” This was the case with beef, which, until mad cow disease, was routinely fed to other cattle. Cows are still fed fertilizer, chicken feces, and cow blood. “I’m imagining we know even less about what goes into fish feed than we do about cattle feed,” Pollan said.100 The consumer protection group Monterey Bay Seafood Watch has tried to warn the public of food safety and sustainability concerns tied to farmed seafood from certain countries. In 2021, the organization advised the public to avoid Atlantic salmon from Canada due to concerns related to the release of antibiotics and other chemicals into the surrounding environment.
Sara Lewis, director of programs for FishWise, a sustainability and labor non-profit organization, explained that one of the reasons these programs are flawed stems from how they were initiated. She said that aquaculture certification programs were designed on the heels of those that previously focused on wild catch and were not sufficiently tailored. “Though the intentions were to model aquaculture certifications on the wild certifications of a decade before, aquaculture has the tricky problem of needing to account for feed origins that wild fishery certifications don’t,” she said.101
Meaning & Methods of Improvement
Five certification programs are most popular in relation to aquaculture seafood. They include Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) and Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), which concentrate on the sustainability and legality of fish farming; MarinTrust, which focuses on the processing and traceability of fishmeal and fish oil; and Friend of the Sea, which certifies both fisheries and fishmeal and fish oil processors.102 Countries also rely on Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs), which aim to improve the management of participating fisheries.M
Some ocean conservationists and labor groups have called for seafood companies and grocery chains to stop sourcing from companies or regions tied to labor, food safety, or sustainability concerns.103 Spokespeople from several certification programs disagreed with this perspective, arguing that a carrot-rather-than-stick approach is best for improving the industry. For example, Dave Martin, a spokesperson for the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, which founded Fisheries Improvement Projects, said, “We ask our partners and those we work with around the world to stay and help fix the problems.” He added, “Fisheries in FIPs are by definition unsustainable,” which is why they are in the program. Asked by The Outlaw Ocean Project why, according to his organization’s own assessment, half of the fisheries reviewed had in recent years dropped into a “poorly managed” category, Martin cited two studies showing that fishery improvement projects help. He also pointed to factors that improvement programs cannot control, such as the performance of government regulators. In regions where governments have rolled back regulations and cut spending toward counting fish and enforcing quotas, Martin said his organization pushes for the companies that source from those waters to play a larger role in preventing overfishing.104
Responsibility
In response to questions from The Outlaw Ocean Project, the various organizations that make up the certification industry emphasized that each plays its own role and cannot be held accountable for others’ responsibilities.105
MarinTrust, for instance, emphasized that its program is not meant to be the “lone driver” but a “credible partner” to governments and NGOs. Regarding labor abuse, spokesperson Libby Woodhatch said MarinTrust’s purpose is strictly to check whether factories comply with national regulations and UN labor conventions.106 ASC spokesperson Gaynyr Dickson added that “certification alone cannot resolve all issues related to the industry” and that ASC does not police labor standards directly. Instead, it relies on fish farms to get their feed from mills that have themselves been certified by other organizations. When asked if the program checks for sustainability problems with feed mills and their fishmeal producers, Dickson said they put that responsibility on the feed mills to do their own “due diligence.”107 Paolo Bray, the founder of Friend of the Sea, similarly stated that his organization does not directly audit ships for labor concerns but relies on independent auditing firms that are supposed to talk to workers in port and review CCTV footage.108 The Global Seafood Alliance, which runs the BAP program, wrote that it is the industry’s “most comprehensive program for farmed seafood” but is also “removed from the auditing and certification decision process,” which is executed instead by third-party auditors.109
Division of labor exists in every industry, though some critics say that its stakes are higher in the certification industry. “The business model is simple,” said a 2025 report from Western Sahara Resource Watch. Exporters pay for certificates, certification bodies issue them, and standard owners license them. "But when things go awry, auditors blame standards, standards blame auditors, both depend financially on the companies they are supposed to control, and almost no one answers questions, the report said. “Everyone gets paid, and when problems emerge, everyone points elsewhere.”110
Certification programs are popular partly because they provide reassurances that allow importers, exporters, and retailers to raise their prices, lessen their legal risk, and attract more investment.111 Companies have a financial incentive to believe the reassurances passed along by certifications and by associates up the chain. The boat captains, fishery officials, fishmeal plant operators, feed mills, fish farmers, seafood brands, restaurateurs, grocers, and even the insurers, banks, and certifiers make up an industry full of stakeholders who receive and hand down such reassurances. Quite often, a compounding confidence snowballs from certifications to marketing claims. Based on their certifications, seafood sellers advertise themselves as more ethical than their competitors.M
Diminishing Deniability?
Seafood companies may face increasing legal challenges to problems within their supply chains. Historically, such companies have, intentionally or unintentionally, distanced themselves from the behaviors of their subcontractors and suppliers abroad, thereby avoiding culpability for the role of bad actors. A case brought in March 2025 by four Indonesian fishers against the canned-tuna giant Bumble Bee concerning the use of forced labor on fishing ships tied to the company could pierce that veil of plausible deniability.112 The fishers sued the company in the Southern District of California for violating the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). The company argued in court documents that it was not responsible for the actions of the relevant fishing ships. In a landmark ruling, the district court allowed the lawsuit to move forward, finding that Bumble Bee “likely had ‘notice about the prevalence’ of forced labor on the vessels from which it sourced tuna, ‘failed to take adequate steps to train staff in order to prevent its occurrence’,” had an “active role in obtaining albacore tuna from the vessels on which Plaintiffs were subject to forced labor,” and resold such procured tuna for profit. Bumble Bee did not respond to a request for comment.113
Dana Cleaveley, a research consultant formerly with SeaChoice, a Canadian environmental advocacy organization focused on advancing sustainable seafood practices, said that historically, various industries have been forced to reckon with human rights and environmental crimes hidden within their supply chains. “Consider sweatshop garments, blood diamonds, and fair-trade coffee,” she said. The seafood industry, however, lags in terms of this type of accountability. As the world scrambles for protein and leans into aquaculture, this industry will have to catch up, she said. That’s likely to happen when more countries impose import controls on seafood that is tainted with illegalities or unsustainable practices. “That’s when investors will begin to see material, not just reputational, risk, and companies will have to adjust.”114
In 2023, the Canadian government concluded that half of the herring populations across Canada’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts were in “cautious” or “critical” zones of health, with pollock off the coast of Nova Scotia also listed as “cautious.”115 Canadian fishery officials explained that they applied the designations to these species because they were being caught at an unsustainable rate and needed protection to bolster their chances for a rebound.116 In 2025, the herring moratorium was extended another two years in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.117
Canada produced more than 800,000 tons of seafood in 2022, of which at least 160,000 tons were grown on farms via aquaculture rather than caught at sea.118 More than 65 percent of the seafood produced by Canada’s fish farms was exported, mainly to the US, Japan, and the European Union.119 Atlantic salmon was the country’s most valuable aquaculture product.120
Years of organizing by marine conservationists and aquaculture critics resulted in British Columbia’s ban on open-net pen salmon farming in 2024.121 But as North America doubles down on strict regulations of aquaculture, seafood companies and consumers will likely shop for salmon in the less regulated marketplace, according to the 2023 book, Where Shrimp Eat Better Than People. “These richer countries will increasingly externalize the ecological costs of these production processes to Asian countries where there are weak monitoring and enforcement capabilities.”122 As difficult as it is to track conditions at a fish farm halfway around the world, it will be even harder to account for where those salmon get their feed.