Peru: The Fishmeal Capital of the World
On August 7, 2023, three huge explosions at a fishmeal plant in the coastal city of Chimbote in northern Peru shattered windows and sent billowing black smoke into the sky.1 More than two dozen angry residents took to the streets in protest.2 “The contamination is killing us,” a man told reporters as police, clad in black and carrying shields, stood nearby.3
In subsequent days, fishers and local residents demanded that the government declare a state of emergency in response to an industry whose choking stench, bloody wastewater, 24-hour truck traffic, and pattern of worker injuries and deaths was, they said, ruining their lives.4 “Don’t murder my children,” read a protester’s sign.5 Local officials replied that they needed more evidence that the factory was, in fact, harming anyone.6 “It must be demonstrated whether there have been any health effects,” an official from the Environmental Assessment and Oversight agency told a radio station in Chimbote.7 “The audible sound perceived corresponded to a controlled pressure release from the safety systems of the rotary tube dryer, without any projection of materials outside the plant,” Pesquera Exalmar’s general manager said in an email to The Outlaw Ocean Project about the explosions. Investigations by police and environmental authorities determined that the incident was an internal accident and did not initiate sanctioning proceedings against the company.
The 2023 fishmeal explosions, angry public reaction, and tepid government response were part of a wider trend. For decades, neighbors of some of Peru’s 160 or so plants complained about the rancid stench that came from factories cooking thousands of tons of rotting fish and turning it into fishmeal, a protein-rich dark-yellow powder made by cooking and pulverizing fish. The alleged misbehavior of this powerful industry was less rogue than routine, they argued. Local residents repeatedly published on social media footage of trucks and plants dumping dead fish and toxic waste in waterways and on roadsides.8M Meanwhile, regulators did little. “Since its beginnings in the 1950s,” a 2024 editorial from the Diario de Chimbote concluded, “the fishing industry, at least here in Chimbote, has been characterized by its tendency to evade regulations on hygiene, sanitation, and the environment.”9M
The stench emanating from the fishmeal plants is more than just an annoyance; it actively corrodes the local economy. The foul odor drives away beach visitors and restaurant patrons, undercutting tourism.
Beyond the economic nuisance, the smell indicates the release of noxious chemicals such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, cyanide, and methane. These substances have been linked to serious health problems, including nausea, pulmonary edema, and even death among plant workers and neighbors. In Chimbote, the air pollution from the industry was also linked to eye, skin, and throat irritation in children.10 The primary source of the “fishy” odor is trimethylamine, or TMA, a colorless gas identified as “strongly toxic and carcinogenic” by the Society of Chemical Industry in 2021.11 The Bait-to-Plate tool, created by The Outlaw Ocean Project to track the world’s fishing and seafood industries, shows over 939,000 people in Peru, including more than 199,700 children under 15, live within a mile of a fishmeal plant.12M
Fishmeal plants in Peru have long been resistant to implementing solutions to the stench, partly because it was difficult and expensive to measure. In 2009, however, a Peruvian scientist named Josué Padilla Lauriano set out to find a cheaper option for testing TMA levels. He focused his research on Chimbote, which is ranked as one of the most polluted places on Earth. Using simple air bubblers and a spectrophotometer—both are standard tools found in nearly every chemistry lab—and adapting a technique originally developed to detect TMA in dead fish, not air, Lauriano and his team spent 20 months collecting samples. Lauriano’s device only cost a few hundred dollars to take measurements. Lauriano found nighttime emissions, when the plants cooked the most, exceeded the amount allowed by regulators.13 Still, the industry and government have failed to systematically track or counter the stench.
As the world's largest producer, accounting for a third of global output, Peru is central to the fishmeal market.14 Global demand for fishmeal has skyrocketed since the early 2000s, driven by its use as a protein-rich supplement in the booming aquaculture sector—the planet’s fastest-growing food sector.15 Fish farming, though existing in rudimentary forms for centuries, offers clear benefits, providing affordable protein and jobs, especially for women in countries like India and Bangladesh.16 Furthermore, certain farmed fish like tilapia and Atlantic salmon have lower greenhouse gas emissions per pound than beef or pork, even when factoring in feed and transportation.17 Especially sustainable is the farming of bivalves—clams, oysters, mussels—as they typically don't require external feed, use minimal land and freshwater, and their shells contribute to carbon capture.18 As of 2022, approximately one-third of global aquaculture did not require external feed inputs.
Dive deeper — 1 of 3 in this report — Footnotes 19–36
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.19 Techniques of animal husbandry developed roughly 12,000 years ago in the so-called “Fertile Crescent,” an ancient area stretching from Mesopotamia to Egypt.20 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.21 Shifting from grazing to penning animals required farmers to provide them with balanced diets.22
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.23 Ocean habitats became calorie factories.
Kristin A. Wintersteen explains how and when the modern world began using the sea as a protein mine.24 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.25
For much of the second half of the 19th century, Peru’s primary export was another unappetizing and smelly product: guano, a nitrogen-rich fertilizer derived from the feces of bats, birds, and seals.26 Peru shifted to harvesting anchovies in the 1950s following the collapse of the California sardine industry. US companies, including Cargill and Ralston Purina, provided Peru with investment, boats, equipment, and training.27 Chimbote was the ideal city for the new fishmeal industry, according to a 2022 investigation by the Global Reporting Centre. The Humboldt Current, which runs along the South American Pacific coast, created the perfect sea conditions for anchovy populations to thrive. And, because Chimbote had been the site of the prosperous international guano trade, roads and railways used to get the valuable bird excrement to markets abroad for use as fertilizer were already in place. The fishmeal industry used the existing infrastructure to quickly start up operations.28
In the 1960s, Dutch farmers began crediting fishmeal from Peru for their success in keeping up with expanding postwar demand for meat and eggs.29 They boasted that their farms were newly “landless” because they could increase their numbers of chickens, pigs, and other animals independently of the additional area of land that they otherwise might need to grow feed for this livestock.30 By relying on Peru for fishmeal, they did not need to find the space to grow their own feed.31 “The phrase ‘landless’ erased from view that these farms in fact depended on places elsewhere on the planet,” Floor Haalboom, a historian from Utrecht University, wrote in a study about the role of fishmeal in industrialization.32
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.
Two-thirds of the world's fish farming relies heavily on fishmeal and fish oil.37 This production is dominated by the six-billion-dollar "reduction industry," which catches wild fish—like menhaden, sardines, krill, and Peruvian anchovies—and “reduces” them into protein-rich powder, pellets, or oil.38 These products are then primarily used to feed higher-priced captive fish destined for seafood buyers. Karen Luyckx, an independent researcher specializing in food systems, highlights the practice of catching food to feed food as “highly wasteful in terms of the energy loss and use of the planet’s resources.” She argues, “If we want to feed a growing global population well and sustainably, we must stop catching wild fish to feed farmed fish.”39
Crucially, the socio-economic and environmental costs of producing this feed are rarely reflected on the balance sheets of the seafood companies. These hidden costs, or what economists call “externalities,” are instead paid by people who are far from where the seafood gets eaten.40 The oceans also pay an especially heavy and unseen toll from this industry.41 In 2022, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that more than a fifth of all marine life pulled out of the water globally was consumed by the feed industry.42 Furthermore, reduction fishing, often utilizing purse-seine or trawl nets, captures substantial non-target fish, or bycatch, significantly harming the ecosystem by removing key prey species.43 This shift toward smaller, less valuable species as predatory fish stocks decline is a stark example of “fishing down the food web.” Consequently, the true cost of farmed fish extends far beyond the price seen on a restaurant menu or in a grocery store.
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
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. But using fishmeal to feed fish farms has turned this goal upside down.M Unlike growing bivalves, the toughest challenge in 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.44 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.45 Before it gets to market, a farm-raised tuna can eat more than 15 times its weight in free-roaming fish that has been converted to fishmeal.46
Global South countries pay an especially heavy price for the growing popularity of fish farming. In Peru, for instance, fishmeal from some of the most problematic plants in Chimbote feeds shrimp that goes to Target and Costco, and salmon that goes to Safeway and Costco in the United States, according to trade data from 2025.47M And yet, consumers of this shrimp and salmon are none the wiser because feed is especially difficult to track. Safeway’s parent company, Albertsons, Target, and Costco did not respond to requests for comment.48
At least 40 of the fishmeal factories in Peru are based in and around the city of Chimbote, which is known as the “fishmeal capital of the world.”M In Chimbote Bay, effluent from these factories has created dead zones where fish suffocate and algae blooms proliferate, while also coating the seabed with a thick layer of toxic sludge.49 Marine scientists estimate that it would take up to seventy years for the seafloor to recover from decades of this industrial activity on Chimbote’s coast.50 In August 2023, dozens of fishers marched in Chimbote’s main square to protest the dumping of blood and other industrial waste into the sea by nearby fishmeal companies.51 Several months later, fishmeal and canning plants in Chimbote’s industrial zone were caught dumping wastewater into the municipal sewage lines.52M
Internationally, Peru’s fishmeal industry portrays itself as a model of sustainability and transparency.53 “Truth is that the industry is actually opaque and plagued by misconduct,” said Eloy Aroni, director of fisheries at Artis0nal, a Lima-based ocean consultancy firm, “And it has been this way for quite a while.”
More than 300 Peruvian fishing ships ply coastal waters for the anchovies that get converted into high-protein fishmeal powder or pellets. At least 140 of these ships were involved in a variety of alleged illegal fishing infractions between 2018 and 2025, according to news reports, government documents, trade records, and court filings compiled in The Outlaw Ocean’s Bait-to-Plate tool.M These ships were involved in at least 150 reported incidents of alleged illegal fishing, including exceeding quotas, catching too many juveniles, and invading marine protected areas.54M Between January 2020 and March 2025, at least 46 vessels in Peruvian waters fished sensitive zones, according to satellite data analyzed by OceanMind and ProtectedSeas, a project that independently verifies and maps marine protected area regulatory information worldwide. Fishing in Peru’s marine protected areas is generally illegal for industrial vessels and only allowed for small‑scale fishers under strict, area‑specific permits.55
These incursions happened at least 600 times, primarily targeted five marine protected areas, and each incursion lasted longer than five hours. The protected areas that were targeted included Islas Lobos de Afuera, Nazca Ridge National Reserve, and Punta Atico.56 During this same period, Peruvian fishmeal plants were the target of at least 40 instances of civil unrest, typically protests by nearby residents about the rotten stench.57 Plants were also alleged to have illegally dumped untreated waste on at least five occasions.58 “While Peru maintains strict regulatory frameworks, it fails to enforce them, particularly when dealing with economically powerful actors,” concluded a 2025 report on overfishing, published in Marine Policy.59M
Dive deeper — 2 of 3 in this report — Footnotes 60–95
Certification & The Growing Risk of False Advertising
Marine conservation groups like Oceana and Greenpeace have argued that the Peruvian government regulators should better police their fishmeal and fishing industry, ensuring compliance with the law. When these regulators fail to do so, industry-led certification programs have sought to fill the gap. These programs claim to provide assurances that the supply chains connecting Peru’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 can end up serving as sustainability smokescreens, as their purview is not broad enough, leaving ethics practices farther down the supply chain to fall through the cracks.60
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.61 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.62
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.63M 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.”64 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.65
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.66
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.67
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.68 Countries also rely on Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs), which aim to better the management of certain fisheries.M At least 54 plants in Peru were certified under such programs as of 2024.69 Of these, at least 52 were involved in activities that seem to have violated certification criteria, The Outlaw Ocean Project found.70
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.71
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.72 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.”73 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.74 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.75
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.”76
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.77 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
One of Peru’s biggest fishmeal companies, and also the location of the 2023 explosions that led to area protests, is called Pesquera Exalmar. In correspondence with The Outlaw Ocean Project, the company’s general manager, Rossana Ortiz Rodriguez, said that the events of August 2023 occurred and remained strictly within the boundaries of the plant.78 “The 2023 incident was an internal operational event, without external consequences, and has served to further strengthen our maintenance and third-party management protocols.” Technical assessments found no impact on the structural integrity of beams or walls of adjacent homes, she said, but after five neighbors reported cracked windowpanes, the company replaced the windows, “prioritizing community peace of mind and maintaining our standard of good neighborliness.” No material was projected outside the plant, Rodriguez said, and a police investigation verified the impact of the incident was internal, accidental, and did not require referral to the prosecutor’s office.79 Air quality monitoring conducted by Peru’s environmental authority “confirmed that there was no dispersion of pollutants affecting air quality or the marine environment of the bay,” the general manager added.
Pesquera Exalmar operates a fishing fleet that was reportedly involved in at least a dozen instances of illegal fishing, according to materials including regulatory compliance documents reviewed by The Outlaw Ocean Project.80M Nonetheless, this company’s Chimbote plant has been certified under the MarinTrust Global Standard for Responsible Supply from 2015 through 2025.81 Among other criteria, this standard forbids fishmeal plants from using illegally-caught fish.82 Fishmeal from this same plant goes to a Biomar feed mill, where it picks up another certification: BAP, which further guarantees that no illegally-caught fishmeal or fish oil is used.83 Then this feed goes to fish farms and is fed to tilapia that is sold in the US at major retailers like Costco, Target, and Publix.84 In Europe, it is fed to shrimp sold at the likes of Carrefour, Leclerc, and Auchan.85M “Pesquera Exalmar is committed to responsible and sustainable fishing, ensuring environmental protection and preservation of the resource,” Rodriguez said in a statement to The Outlaw Ocean Project.86 Carrefour 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.”87 Biomar, Costco, Target, Publix, and E.Leclerc did not respond to a request for comment.88 Auchan was verifying any direct or indirect commercial relationship with the companies mentioned, while “also reviewing available traceability and due diligence information relevant to the products and supply chains concerned,” said Auchan’s chief ethics and compliance officer, Stéphane Bernardeau.89 “Given the nature of the allegations and the supply chain issues raised, we are treating these matters with the appropriate level of attention.”90
Such disparities between the behavior of plants and ships in a supply chain and the claims of certifications given downstream are not limited to Pesquera Exalmar. Peru’s fishmeal industry boasts that more of its plants are certified by the MarinTrust Global Standard for Responsible Supply than anywhere else in the world.91 But advocates and researchers say that this boast means little. “The certification body Peru’s European clients rely on as a guarantor of the industry’s sustainability, MarinTrust, is fatally flawed,” concluded the Changing Markets Foundation report.
Tracking fish from boat to fishmeal plant is difficult in Peru for a variety of reasons, including hidden vessels, illegal processing plants, and unauthorized exports. Oceana identified 10 unlicensed fishmeal plants in Pisco in 2019.92 Anchovies are routinely transported across the border to informal fishmeal plants in Ecuador, according to the US Department of Labor.93 Official data from the Peruvian government indicates that the country exports more fishmeal than it officially produces.94 “This annual mismatch of 46,000 tonnes of ‘phantom’ fishmeal further undermines the sector’s sustainability claims,” concluded Danwatch, a conservation group that studied exports between 2012 and 2018.95
By 2024, Peru’s fishmeal industry produced $2 billion in annual revenue and employed thousands of people on fishing boats, in processing plants, and in ancillary services like ship maintenance, fuel transport, and port services.96
Some of these jobs are dangerous. Globally, fishing is ranked as the deadliest profession, with more than 100,000 fatalities annually.97 In 2021, two workers at Pesquera Caral, which operates a fishmeal plant in Chancay, died from ammonia inhalation while unloading a factory vessel owned by the company.98M In 2023, two workers fell into the hold of a ship owned by CFG, another fishmeal company, while unloading anchovies, and asphyxiated due to the toxic gases there.99 That same year, a fisher who worked at a company called TASA died at sea when a cable hit him.100 “Sadly, the life of one TASA staff member was lost in an accident at sea,” said TASA in a statement. The company mobilized all necessary human and logistical resources to ensure those affected received appropriate ongoing medical care, including psychological resources for their families, she said.101 Pesquera Caral and CFG did not respond to a request for comment.102
In 2019, the Austral Group, which owns at least four fishmeal factories in Peru, paid 1.2 million soles, or approximately $300,000, to the families of eight fishers who died in a collision between two fishing boats off the coast of Chimbote.103 In response to questions about the incident from The Outlaw Ocean Project, the Austral Group’s general counsel, Diana Reiley, said that the company immediately assisted and supported the Port Authority in the wake of the collision by supplying its own specialized rescue diving teams, tugboats, and platforms. “From the outset, our company was in contact with the families of the deceased, providing them with assistance and financial support as needed,” she added.104
Measured in tons of fish produced, the Peruvian fishery is the largest in the world.M This fishery almost exclusively produces fishmeal, nearly all of which is destined for export, with over 85 percent sent to China.105 The FAO and the Peruvian government have, as recently as 2024, said that the health of the Peruvian anchoveta fishery is strong.106 Critics are skeptical about these health assessments, arguing that due to El Niño, climate change, and other factors, the anchoveta fishery has seen dramatic boom and bust cycles, varying drastically from one year to the next, which means short-term stock assessments are poor predictors of long-term health. “Biomass is believed to be overestimated,” Fishsource, a website that compiles and summarizes fisheries information, concluded in 2025, explaining that stock assessments are likely inaccurate.107M
- Peruvian Anchoveta (Engraulis ringens)Source
Peruvian fishing companies have historically benefited from government support. Peru gave at least $20 million in harmful subsidies to its fishing industry in 2018, according to a study by the University of British Columbia.108 Fishing subsidies are controversial because many researchers say that they can put too many fishing ships on the water, which accelerates overfishing.109 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 Peru is a member, went into effect in 2025. Under this agreement, member states pledged to ban subsidies that contributed to unregulated or illegal fishing and the targeting of overfished stocks.110
Peru’s rules are often weak or unenforced, according to Aroni, from Artis0nal, the Lima-based ocean consultancy firm. For instance, the government only requires boat and plant operators to document, not halt, unsustainable practices like targeting juvenile fish.111 Peruvian regulations prohibit industrial vessels from targeting anchovies under 12 centimeters, or a little over four and a half inches, allowing only 10 percent of each catch to consist of juveniles.112 Captains are required to report juvenile bycatch via biometric sampling.113 However, in 2016, regulators eliminated financial penalties for exceeding this limit as long as vessels reported their catches.114 The result has been that the country’s largest fishing and fishmeal companies persistently catch juvenile fish with little incentive to stop.115 Government data indicates that one of the most frequently reported is Peru’s largest company, Tecnológica de Alimentos (TASA), which has ties to many brands of seafood consumed globally. “Our operations have been conducted in full compliance with the applicable national regulatory framework and always under the authorization of competent authorities,” said TASA in a statement, adding that “the extraction of juvenile and incidental catch lacks intent (dolus) or negligence” and “these are occurrences inherent to the fishing industry, the conditions of which are duly regulated and recognized by the fishing authority.”116 TASA has supplied fishmeal used to feed some of the largest shrimp farms in Vietnam, which, in turn, supply major grocers, including Kroger in the United States and Walmart and Metro in Canada.117M “All Metro suppliers are required to respect working conditions across the supply chain as outlined in our Supplier Code of conduct for responsible procurement (SCoC),” said company spokesperson Stephanie Bonk.118 Kroger and Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.119
Smaller artisanal fishers say that government regulators unfairly favor bigger industrial companies. In late 2019 and early 2020, Peru’s anchovy fishing sector faced a corruption scandal involving Peruvian officials allegedly inflating estimates for the size and health of the anchovy stock to benefit major fishing companies, resulting in overfishing, according to a report from the Changing Markets Foundation.120 The ensuing public outcry led to protests, the early closure of the fishing season, and an ongoing criminal investigation into regulatory officials and several fishing and fishmeal companies.121 Separately, on May 27, 2022, the Ministry of Production issued a supreme decree drastically reducing fines and taxes owed, which had been accrued by large fishing companies and plants in Peru. Some companies lodge legal challenges in a bid to delay paying fines until the cases are either dismissed or a favorable decree such as this was enacted, according to El Foco.122
Dive deeper — 3 of 3 in this report — Footnotes 123–148
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.”123 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.”124 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.”125
Ocean researchers and marine historians, however, offer a different view about global demand for fishmeal and farmed fish.126 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.’”127 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.128
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.129 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.130 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.131 Overall demand for fishmeal also seems to be increasing.132 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.133
Meanwhile, global fishmeal supplies could be tapped out as soon as 2028, according to Novel Sharma, a Rabobank analyst specializing in seafood and aquaculture.134 “A shortage is inevitable,” the report said.135 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.
In Peru, at least 62 clandestine fishmeal facilities operated along the coast, many of them running secret “drying fields” where anchovies were being sun-dried in unsanitary conditions to produce low-grade fishmeal, according to a 2019 investigation.136 Roughly 150,000 tons of anchoveta intended for human consumption were allegedly illegally diverted to fishmeal production, the investigation found.137 Why does this matter? Because downstream from these plants, it means that Western seafood buyers are “fuelling a modern-day food imperialism, with little attention or care paid to the grave ramifications of the food-feed competition,” according to a 2024 study by Feedback Global.138 One in six small children in Peru suffers from chronic malnutrition, while a source of protein that was once vital and affordable in poorer coastal communities is redirected toward luxury goods like salmon and shrimp, which are mainly eaten in wealthier countries.139
Assessing the climate impact of carnivorous fish farming is also complicated.140 The industry markets aquaculture seafood as a climate-friendly protein source.141 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.142 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.143 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.144 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.145
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.146 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.147 “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.148
Peruvian fishers have been especially worried that local stocks are insufficiently protected. In January 2023, dozens of fishers protested outside the fishery agency, calling for a stop to the anchovy fishing season.149 In December 2023, fishers marched through the city of Chimbote to again demand an end to the fishing season, warning that juvenile anchovies were being “indiscriminately preyed upon.”150 This protest came after fishing regulators authorized a second season of industrial fishing despite research that had recently indicated sharp declines in the number of juvenile fish in local waters.151 In October 2024, dozens of artisanal fishers blocked major highways and held a 48-hour strike to protest the presence of foreign industrial vessels that, protesters claimed, were permitted to catch huge quantities of fish without restrictions while artisanal fishers abided by reduced fishing quotas that negatively affected their livelihoods.152
Industrial fishing is not the only culprit. Peru’s artisanal fishers also play a role in overfishing. The Peruvian government regulates who can fish for anchovies and for what purposes.153 Industrial ships are permitted to land catch for fishmeal.154 Artisanal boats are supposed to supply anchovies and other fish for direct human consumption.155 In practice, however, much of the catch from these smaller boats ends up being processed for fishmeal, which is more profitable than selling it to local food markets, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.156 Trucks pick up the catch from port and store it until it rots and is no longer safe for human consumption, before routing it to be reduced into fishmeal, according to an investigation by Oceana.157M
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.158 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.159
This is a complex undertaking for government and industry alike, in part because the ships that supply Peru’s fishmeal plants are distinctly difficult to monitor. Between 2019 and 2024, at least 30 vessels likely transshipped at sea, sometimes in international waters but often in national waters where the practice is banned, according to research by the Allen Institute for AI, a maritime tracking firm. Transshipment at sea is problematic because it enables fishing ships to keep workers at sea for perilously long periods, allows scofflaw vessels to avoid oversight, and makes it difficult for companies to know where their seafood was caught.160 Tracking ships from Peru’s fishmeal fleet is additionally difficult because at least 200 of them lack International Maritime Organization (IMO) numbers, which function like license plates and are required by the United Nations agency. At least 280 are also not registered on the FAO Global Record, a database that the international community uses to monitor ships.161M
All of these barriers make it that much harder for companies or consumers to know the true costs of fishmeal coming from Peru. But, in places like Chimbote, these costs are neither new nor discreet. In 1970, “an estimated 4,200 tons of untreated stickwater entered the ocean every hour” on the Peruvian coast, according to the 2013 book Guano and the Blue Revolution.162 As a result, the bays of fishmeal towns like Chimbote were turned into eutrophic death zones.
Over three decades later, the pollution continued. In 2003, Maria Elena Foronda Farro, a Peruvian sociologist and co-founder of the NGO Natura, won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Award for her brave efforts to highlight government inaction toward the fishmeal industry and its persistent pollution, especially in Chimbote.163 Two decades after she won that award, much of her work remained unfinished. In 2023, as the crowds took to the streets in reaction to the fishmeal explosions in Chimbote, they were protesting the very same plants that Foronda had targeted for cleanup.