Greece I: Seafood Problems at Home Start Elsewhere

In May 2026, the Hellenic Aquaculture Producers Organization (HAPO) gathered in Athens to promote the industry as the future of sustainable food security. Flanked by industry titans, the European Commissioner for Fisheries and Oceans, Costas Kadis, painted aquaculture as a solution to the pressures of climate change, pollution and overfishing. “In the European Union, aquaculture is at the epicentre of our priorities,” he said.¹ The Chairman of HAPO, Apostolos Touralias, went one step further in promoting the industry’s future importance: “Aquaculture is the most sustainable form of animal protein,” he said. “Aquaculture needs less space, less feed, less freshwater. It produces the lowest carbon footprint regarding all other sectors.”²

After the 2011 debt crisis, Greece bet its coastal future on the blue economy by mapping out 25 “Areas of Organized Development” (POAY). While many of these zones still remain in the final stage of legal approval, the plan earmarked potentially exclusive use of almost 60,000 acres of coast to multinational firms.³ Expanding the industry's footprint 24-fold came with a simple economic pitch: 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.⁴

From the Ionian Sea in the west to the Euboean Gulf in the east, the Greek farmed finfish industry is now the most valuable in the European Union.^5M Producing over 120,000 tons annually, Greece is the bloc’s top producer of sea bream and sea bass.⁶ This export-driven industry sends over 80 percent of its harvest abroad—primarily to the culinary hubs of Italy, Spain, and France, which absorb nearly three-quarters of these exports.⁷

Now accounting for over two thirds of the nation’s total fish production, aquaculture provides a valuable maritime economy to remote coastal communities employing roughly 4,000 people directly and another 6,000 indirectly.⁸ 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.⁹

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 produced in Greece – sea bass and 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, which are ingredients made by cooking and pulverizing wild-caught fish.¹⁰ Before it reaches market, a farmed seabass or sea bream, for instance, eats at some Mediterranean farms more than two-and-a-half times its weight in wild-caught fish.¹¹

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. 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.¹² 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 types of seafood are eaten.¹³

In Gambia and Mauritania, the two-year Outlaw Ocean Project investigation documented how the industry drives food insecurity as fish that once sustained local communities are increasingly being diverted into fishmeal factories for export.¹⁴ In remote islands in Russia’s far east and in China’s Xinjiang region, the reporting detailed the use of forced labor on ships, farms and in factories.¹⁵ In other countries, including India and Peru, this industry was tied to at least 80 incidents of civil unrest, some of them violent, usually in the form of labor strikes and community protests sparked by the water pollution or the stench from factories cooking thousands of tons of decomposing fish.^16M

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.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸

And in Greece, the investigation found two of the largest aquaculture players illegally sourcing fishmeal from Western Sahara.

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.¹⁹ Still, Moroccan ships routinely fish in Western Saharan waters, turning their illegal catch into fishmeal in Western Saharan plants, before exporting it to farms globally labeled as Moroccan.²⁰ 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 2020.²¹

Avramar—which controls 70 percent of Greek production and exports to 40 countries—imports raw materials and ingredients from more than a dozen Moroccan companies.²² Additionally, one of its subsidiary companies, Perseus—which has since been enveloped into Avramar's larger operations—was confirmed as receiving shipments of fishmeal from Western Sahara as recently as 2022.²³

Greece’s largest feed manufacturer, Irida, also receives raw ingredients from two companies primarily based in Western Sahara: Copelit, and Protein and Oil Industry.^24M

When asked about these issues, none of the companies responded to a request for comment.^25M

Illegally fishing without the permission of the Sahrawis, and importing to EU markets under false Moroccan labels has ecological and humanitarian consequences. Some 180,000 Sahrawi people live in refugee camps in Algeria while overfishing undermines local food security—Greek complicity exacerbates harm in both situations.²⁶

Sea bass and sea bream produced in Greece and sold at major European retailers were fed fishmeal also tied to more than a dozen environmental enforcement actions in US waters between 2018 and 2022, and humpback whale deaths in the Southern Ocean in 2024, according to the Outlaw Ocean’s investigation.²⁷

Indeed, 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, especially fish feed but also for chickens and pigs.²⁸ The investigation assessed more than 2,400 ships tied to fishmeal production, operating in the waters of at least 30 countries.^29M 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.³⁰ 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.

At least half of the species landed by the assessed fishmeal vessels were classified by scientific studies as “overexploited” or worse.^31M Most of the vessels in this fleet are purse seiners or trawlers, which deploy vast nets to capture dense schools of fish.³² Both gear types are associated with high levels of waste, routinely hauling in large volumes of bycatch and non-target species.³³ At least 165 of the ships in the global fishmeal fleet were bottom trawlers, a particularly destructive form of fishing that uses weighted nets that scrape the ocean floor, destroying virtually everything in its path.³⁴ The problem of unsustainable fishing is compounded by heavy government subsidies that keep too many vessels operating, accelerating pressure on already stressed fisheries.³⁵

“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.”³⁶

Fishmeal Plants in Greece

International harms are mirrored at home with over 140 abandoned farms littering Greek coastlines, dozens of farms operating inside marine protected areas, and waste suffocating seagrass meadows—vital carbon sinks that absorb carbon dioxide at a rate 35 times that of a tropical rainforest.^37M

Issues with Greek aquaculture also extend to the food safety standards of supply chains. In 2023, shipments of fishmeal and fish oil from Oman were rejected entry to Piraeus port for Salmonella contamination and falsified veterinary health certificates. Destined for a Greek feed mill that itself exports to the US and Canada, the 500 metric tons were accompanied by fraudulent documents falsely claiming the exporter was approved under EU law to ship food-grade products.³⁸

While companies like Avramar—which was recently acquired by the Canadian company Cooke Inc., and rebranded in August to Cooke Hellas—claim a “commitment to safeguarding marine biodiversity,” their reliance on “overexploited” West African sardines tells a different story.³⁹ By the company’s own marketing standards, the wide-scale extraction of vital West African foodstuffs to feed luxury seafood for wealthy markets falls far short of responsible sourcing. Avramar acknowledged a request for comment but did not respond further.⁴⁰

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 animal^MEvery mark is one anchoveta, at one size

730anchoveta 1 Salmon

390anchoveta 1 Trout

3anchoveta 1 Carp

1anchoveta 1 Shrimp

The natural food web, including 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 turned 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 Fish and Fisheries journal.⁴¹ Most fishmeal plants around the world rely on whole fish rather than processing waste or inedible byproducts, further intensifying local protein scarcity.⁴²

Harvesting bivalves, like clams, oysters, scallops, and mussels, is an especially sustainable type of aquaculture, since these species do not require feed.⁴³ This type of aquaculture makes up 11 percent of Greece’s output, 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.⁴⁴ As of 2022, roughly a third of global aquaculture did not require external feed inputs.⁴⁵

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 can be eaten by people.

However, as aquaculture overall grows so too is demand for fishmeal, and 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 FAO.

Asked about sustainability concerns tied to her industry, Véronique Jamin, a spokesperson from IFFO, which is the international fishmeal association, said that fish farming is “the most efficient animal protein system.” She added that her organization’s “role is not to advise which markets should use fishmeal and fish oil.”⁴⁶ “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.”

Efforts to move away from fishmeal and fish oil have also struggled. Researchers have identified various potential alternative food sources for carnivorous farmed fish — including seaweed, cassava waste, soldier-fly larvae, single-cell proteins produced by fungi and bacteria, and even sewage.⁴⁷ None are being produced affordably at scale, however.⁴⁸ The alternatives often lack the full range of nutrients that support the growth of farmed fish, especially omega-3. Certain options, like insect meal, are expensive, and, as a result, there has been limited interest among feed companies to pay a premium for these “green” alternatives.⁴⁹

As the production of seafood has become more globalized, its supply chains have stretched longer, and it has become tougher for consumers to know whether it was harvested sustainably or legally.⁵⁰ Most grocers who sell the 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.”⁵¹

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.^M Critics say these programs serve more as a sustainability smokescreen while giving downstream customers a way to avoid having to look deeper into their supply chains.⁵² The programs generally focus on environmental crimes while mostly overlooking labor abuses on ships. Allie Brudney, a Senior Staff Attorney at Corporate Accountability Lab, a strategic litigation non-profit group, 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.⁵³ 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.

Regardless, none of Greece’s mills, hatcheries, farms, or processors are certified by The Global Seafood Alliance’s Best Aquaculture Practices program.⁵⁴

Partly bolstered by certification programs, seafood companies routinely make marketing claims about the ethics and sustainability of their seafood.⁵⁵ 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.⁵⁶ This disconnect is creating growing legal risk for seafood companies and grocers.

As Greek aquaculture looks to expand, the disconnect between its sustainability claims and external feed poses a legal and reputational risk. While the EU is introducing fines for supply chains that fail to independently undertake due diligence, these won’t enter into force until 2028. Until then, the onus will remain with Greece to untangle the legal and environmental mess of its own waters.

Dana Cleaveley, a research consultant formerly with SeaChoice, a Canadian sustainable-seafood group, 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.”⁵⁷