The Current - The hidden costs of fish feed

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

A global investigation exposes the hidden costs of the fish meal industry, the food that's made to feed farmed seafood. Investigative journalist and director of The Outlaw Ocean Project, Ian Urbina, talks about the stench, the pollution and civil unrest driven by the booming fish feed industry.

Guessing is for game shows, not your business, especially when your margin for error is zero. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT, with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you accuracy 24-7, and the ability to not just get work done, but get it done right. It's a new work day. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. The next time you have some shrimp or salmon on your plate, there's a good chance that that fish or seafood is farmed, not wild.

More than half of the seafood eaten worldwide comes from fish farms. What do those farmed fish eat? Fish meal made from wild fish. The fish meal industry is booming around the world, and that comes with hidden costs to workers, communities and the environment and those of us who eat farmed fish. For the past five years, the nonprofit news organization, the Outlaw Ocean Project, has investigated the fish meal industry.

And today, it's releasing its findings in a project called Food for Feed. Ian Urbina is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He's director of the Outlaw Ocean Project. He's in Washington, D.C. this morning. Ian, good morning. Good morning, Matt. I want to get to the specifics of this report. It's wild to read through and to see some of the footage that you've captured.

But just briefly, you've spent a lot of time looking at lawlessness on the seas, human rights, environmental concerns, labor issues. Why this issue? Why did you want to spend time looking at this issue of what the fish that we eat are fed? I think for two reasons. One, the world is moving increasingly toward using aquaculture or fish farming as the main source of seafood in 2020. 22, we passed that threshold of more than half of all seafood. Eaton is farmed. So that seemed like where the future was.

And then secondly, because even though these are farms and it's happening on land, there was an at-sea story that people didn't seem to know about. And that brought me back to my sweet spot, you know, reporting on the ocean. So I kind of wanted to shed light on the at-sea portion of fish farming. We're also eating a lot of fish, right? a global consumption of fish has more than doubled in the last several years. Yeah, it is the protein source of the future generally. And so that too felt like it was a good investment of time.

So we're talking about fish meal. What actually is fish meal? So fish meal, or its sort of liquid equivalent fish oil, is wild caught fish that's, you know, kind of netted in massive quantities and ground up and then cooked and then pulverized and turned into pellets or powder. And it's a really rich source, not just of protein, but omega elements that provide a nutrient base for livestock feed. Tell me more about how it's produced. You've written a piece for The New York Times this morning, which includes videos of,

it's an enormous industrial operation. These fish factories, with front-end loaders, they're scooping up huge piles of fish and then pouring them into these grinders where the fish are kind of pulverized, as you said, and ground up into this sort of slurry. Describe more about how this happens. Yeah, I mean, it's a truly industrial and bulk-based process where you're trying to amass quantities of this, what they would call raw material, but you would and I would call fish. And a lot of the fish is fish that historically people have eaten, but instead are now being routed as a raw material into this resource. We're talking about a global industry that has on the order of 1,500 to 2,000 factories around the world.

Most of them concentrated in the global south, typically on the coast because you don't want to have to truck all that fish inland. And like you say, it's a very mechanized factory, typically, sort of a Willy Wonka style set of machines that run a long length. And not a whole lot of workers there. They feed the stuff on the front end, and it comes out the other end. It's a very smelly business, as you would guess. You know, it's rotting fish to the thousands of tons of it, 24-7 getting cooked. So you can assume safely that it's very stinky. And it produces a lot of liquid and gaseous, noxious waste that has to be dealt with, dumped somewhere.

And those consequences, the smell and the pollution, not to mention the worker safety issues because it's a highly flammable thing, fishmeal, are part of what are the hidden costs that you don't think about when you eat farmed seafood. Just the last point on the scale of this, one of the stats that you have in your report is what? More than a fifth of all marine life that is removed from the ocean is used for feed. Is that right? Yeah, more than a fifth is used for non-human consumption. And the vast majority of that is livestock feed, mostly fish farming. Some of it is pet food. Some of it is omega supplements, you know, these pills you take for healthier living.

but most of it is fish farming feed. And is this bycatch or is it, like where is the fish coming from? Part of this is being scraped from the bottom because there's bottom trawlers as well. But where is that fish coming from? Yeah. So the fish is coming from midwater and lower water. It's the target fish is typically small schooling fish. these are sort of the bottom tier of the marine food chain, if you will.

It's what the other bigger fish rely on as food for them. And in most places, these are industrial fisheries, meaning like in Peru, which is the largest export in the world of this, it's a fishery that's just for anchovies, that's just for fishmeal. But in many places, increasingly, let's say the coast of West Africa, Gambia, Senegal, Martania, they're now targeting fish that historically people would be eating like the bonga fish. So these are various types of fish. There's typically netted in trawls, like you say, bottom or midwater trawls, and amassed and brought

to shore. We'll come back to the Canadian connection in a moment, but this is important in part because people might think this is a faraway story. It's not. There are more than 200 fish farms in this country. How many of them rely on fish meal that is sourced from? abroad. The vast majority, most of what's grown on fish farms, two-thirds globally of what is farmed, are the fed types of fish, right? So these are, and that means fishmeal or fish oil fed,

salmon, shrimp, etc. There is a one-third that's not fed. These are bivalves, and those are actually sustainable and quite good for the environment because you're not relying on fish meal and fish oil and really worthy, you know, sources of protein for their planet. But the majority, unfortunately, the two-thirds of seafood coming from farms are the bad type of seafood that's largely dependent on fish meal and fish oil. You're reporting links of fish producing company in Canada to a processing plant in India, in India, Goa, India, called United Marine Products. What happened in that plant? Yeah, I mean, throughout India and at that plant and others, you have a range of issues. One, you have the disposal problem where they're attempting at these plants to get rid of the sludge,

and sometimes they're doing so by dumping it in rivers or drilling wells, if you will, sort of boreholes on the grounds near the plant and injecting it into the ground, which creates real water table, concerns for drinking water and livestock, but also the air pollution of these plants, that one included, is horrific and local folks are suffering not just the sort of nuisance of stench, but also the thing that stench indicates, which is harm, right? You know, health harm, because what causes things to smell bad are usually toxic fumes, toxic chemicals that are not good to be breathing in. One in particular called TMA is a carcinogenic, and that's the specific chemical that causes the fishy smell and rotting fish. So all these concerns are the ones that

we mapped to plants, including that one, in India, and then that supply chain is feeding fish that ends up on the shelves in Canada. What's that connection with the seafood here in Canada? Well, I mean, it's large. I mean, just think of it this way. 80%, more than 80% of all seafood consumed in Canada is imported, right? And much of that seafood is the far, 50% over 50% of seafood consumed and imported is farmed. So most of the popular forms of seafood, so shrimp and salmon being the biggest, are fed and they're coming from Norway, India, and China. And most of the grocery stores in Canada are selling that very same type of seafood. There's a Canadian company, Scretting, that is tied to what we've been talking about.

Tell me about those ties and how that company responded to your investigation. Again, I mean, I'll keep these things somewhat general. So Scretting and other companies responded either by not responding, which was the norm. So when we presented our findings in writing upwards of six months ago, most companies did not respond at all. For two reasons. One, the industry writ large doesn't know where its feed comes from because most end producers and sellers of seafood may know where the farm is that they get their seafood from. And they may have standards put on the farm as to sort of the use of antibiotics and the cleanliness. of those settings, but they almost never know where the feed that powers their farm comes from.

They're not looking that far back in their supply chains. So shredding and other companies, if they answered it all to us, answered that they were sure in the quality of their seafood, but they were speaking about starting the story at the farm, not starting the story where their feed came from. Guessing is for game shows, not your business. especially when your margin for error is zero. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT, with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails.

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and cultural enrichment, on board, and on shore. With a variety of voyages and sailing dates to choose from, now is the time to explore Europe's waterways. Learn more at viking.com. You said something earlier about the danger of these plans. And part of this is the noxious smell, and we'll come back to that in a moment. But there's also, in reading the report stories of these plants just kind of bursting into flames? Yeah, I mean, it's a funny thing.

As a kid, I always thought this notion of, you know, spontaneous combustion was the stuff of comic books, and it didn't really exist scientifically. But it turns out it does. And there are certain things that can catch fire on their own because of how they might decay and heat up. Fishmeal is one of those things. it's spontaneous combusts. And so in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, you had dozens upon dozens of factories and plants,

excuse me, and ships that were catching fire. These are because they had these huge dunes of this decaying powder that was waiting to be shipped or in the process of being shipped, and it decayed further and heated up and sparked and caught fire. So Fishmeal was actually pretty dangerous when you leave it for a while. Along came Monsanto in the 80,

well, in the 50s, they invented something called athoxicine, a chemical. It's a fire retardant. It was originally used on fruit and other sort of vegetables to keep them from drying out. And the thought was, well, why don't we spray this anti, you know, sort of this fire retardant on athoxicine, on, excuse me, on fishmeal before we put it in the ship and send it across the ocean. And so it worked. You know, it was really an amazing success story in many ways. And governments, including the U.S., began requiring to be sprayed on fishmeal before it was transported. But lo and behold, in the 80s, new research came out that indicated that ethoxicon was a carcinogen and then moved to the present. You now see

ethoxicine showing up in seafood because it's being put on the fishmeal that's getting fed to the farmed fish. So some places in the world, including the European Union, have banned it entirely. But other places, including Canada and the U.S., have traits. amounts that are allowed to be found in the seafood, but the testing for it is very rare. So it's really not known how much athoxicine is indeed showing up in the seafood that we end up eating. As you mentioned, many of these factories that are grinding up and boiling down and storing this rotting fish and seafood are in the global south, and it stinks.

And that has led to political and civil unrest, as you document, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, stench is an interesting category of crime or concern, if you will. It's a burden that you and I might not think of. It doesn't get transported when we buy our things. You know, it's a harm that is left over there, right? And that's kind of what globalization has afforded us. But it's a really serious consequence for you if you live in that place near that plant. You know, no more beachgoers, no more restaurant goers, your tourism-based fall.

through the floor, your clothes stink. It's hard to host people at your house. It's just more than just an inconvenience. And that causes people to get angry, you know, and organize. And in places like India and Peru, they have, that has been the biggest spark of demonstrations and strikes on the local level surrounding these plants, because they're often in places where it's not just one plant, it's a concentration of a half dozen. You said something earlier as well that was really interesting, which is that some of this fish that is being scooped up and then ground up was fish that once was caught to be eaten and is now being used for, I guess, being diverted in some ways, right? What does that mean? Yeah, I mean, this is the food insecurity element

of the story, right? And as you look at this issue globally, and then you hone in on the global south producers of the stuff, and then you hone in even more carefully on, well, not just the marine concerns, the ocean conservation concerns, the species that are being overly targeted and are disappearing, but also what about the people on shore and the livelihoods of the people that were depending on the catching and the selling and the feeding of people for that? And you start seeing a really dire story in places like Senegal, Gambia, Mortania, because the stocks have been so overfished, they're now moving towards human consumption food, and it's getting a better price. for the fishers, for the fishermen, to deliver that to the factory than it is to deliver that to

the table of fishmonger women, mostly, who previously would slice and dice it and sell it to locals to eat. So now they're one of the cheapest, most accessible forms of protein is disappearing from the local market because it's going into a factory for export. You investigated thousands of ships that are tied to the production of fish meal in something like 30 different countries. Is there any sort of body that oversees that work or is trying to regulate who and where and what the conditions are that people are fishing in? Not really. I mean, there is the, there are bodies. There are typically UN bodies. These are typically consensus-based bodies, which is all to say that what few rules do exist

in these bodies tend to be hard to enforce and fairly watered down. And, they're not sort of covering the entire terrain. They'll cover one species and one patch of water and make sure it's not being overfish, but not a holistic approach and not anything that has teeth on it. So when it comes to the behavior or misbehavior of fishmeal boats globally, there is no single entity. And don't forget, most of these operators, these ships, are operating, again, in the global South countries, in their waters. And those countries don't have navies, Coast Guards or the budget to actually go out and enforce their own local rules, much less the political capital to go up against the multinational companies when they break their rules.

A local government in Senegal is going to be reluctant to go up against a U.S., Canadian or Chinese company because of the political fallout that may occur if they push on that company too hard. Talk about China. China is the world's largest producer and exporter of farmed seafood. So what did you discover when you were looking in and around China? China is big at many things, right? It is a big player globally, and seafood, it is the superpower. And farmed seafood, it is increasingly pushing into that industry for a bunch of reasons.

One, it would like to have protein sovereignty for its own expanding domestic middle class. And so it wants to not be relying on caught seafood in foreign waters or on the high seas. So for that reason, China is really aggressively pushing fish farming. And what's interesting is that historically, there are 68,000 presently, and historically 68,000 of those fish farms are along the coast of China. But it has run into overfishing and pollution problems. So the government in the last decade and a half has started pushing inland and to a surprising place, namely Xinjiang, which is the far west region of the country.

of the country, the most landlock stretch of Earth on the planet and not a place you would expect to be mass-producing seafood. And yet China, in a pretty impressive engineering feat, is now propagating over a thousand fish farms in Xinjiang. And that's really worrisome because, as you know, Xinjiang is among the most repressed areas on planet Earth. and the government is extremely aggressive in repressing the local population there. So that this industry of farmed seafood exporting to places like Canada and the U.S. is in a region that, at least in the U.S., is banned, you know, to produce products for the U.S., is really noteworthy. I was going to say how much of that fish produced there ends up here in this country. Look, you know, 80, like I said, over 80% of Canada's seafood is imported.

roughly 12% of that is coming from China. How much of that 12% is coming from Zingang? Hard to say, but it's not an insignificant amount. We looked at one poster child company in particular called Tian Yun, which is a huge salmon farm in Zingang, and tracked its supply chain and found that it is mass-producing salmon, and some of that salmon is ending up to a major Canadian importer, and that importer in Canada supplies over half dozen major grocery stores, Walmart, Canada, and others in Canada. So a lot of this Xinjiang-based farm seafood is indeed ending up in Canada. It's an incredible story. I mean, the headline of it in some ways is that the seafood caught in poorer countries is being used to grow seafood in richer countries. And again,

when you raise this with the people who are selling us the fish, is your sense that, well, you said that people don't get back to you in some ways, that they don't want to know how far back the supply chain goes and what's happening in the further reaches of the supply chain? I think that's right. I mean, I don't think that most of the industry is willfully participating in these sorts of human rights and environmental crimes. I think that what globalization has afforded you and me is cheap and impossibly efficient products delivered to our doorstep that come at prices that can't be true and they aren't, right? The reason they aren't true is because a lot of the offset costs are offset to far away people that we don't really have to answer to or think about.

And that's what globalization for Nike shoes or iPhones or seafood is giving us. We just happen to focus on the seafood. And so I think that's really what's going on. And there's going to have to be a reckoning in Canada and the U.S. and elsewhere by major sellers of these products that they are really going to need to know where they get their things from and where are there being illegal or unethical or unsustainable costs offset to other people. What does this mean for the idea of farming fish to avoid depleting the oceans? The whole point in some ways of fish farming was that we weren't going to empty the seas. It means that you and I, and I always try to bring it back to us, right? So it's to not point the finger, probably you're going to have to change how we eat and not

take as a fair and comfortable assumption that we can have shrimp year round at impossibly low bottomless prices or salmon, et cetera. We're going to have to think about buying more local. We're going to have to think about buying things that are in season. And we're going to have to think about asking hard questions about is this seafood or this farmed seafood something grown on a on a on a on a feed source that I know now to be really bad and if so I probably shouldn't be buying it there's a line in the new york times piece that you wrote and it else were as well that those of us who have recently eaten farm raised seafood are participating in a developing environmental crisis should we be eating seafood if that's the case you know i'll never go that far i mean i think that

it's it's hard i think that there are are lots of types of seafood that are sustainable. Like I said in the beginning, lots of types of bivalve, and I have property in Prince Edward Island and spend my summers up there. And they do a lot of bivalve, oysters and clams. And this is a form of, and muscles. And this is a form of farmed seafood that's quite sustainable. That's very popular in Canada. And so leaning into the good forms of seafood and trying to inculcate a taste for those things and trying to lean away from what we now know are maybe problematic forms of seafood is probably where we need to go. Did you know much about this story before you got into it? I think one of the things people

listening will say is I had no idea. Like I literally had no idea. I didn't. Five years ago, when I started this, I didn't know much about or think much about what are the things that feed the food that we eat. You know, we know more about the food and is it, you know, free-range chicken and, you know, like fair trade coffee and these sorts of things. But what about the ingredients that go into it? You think about conflict diamonds and you think about, you know, precious minerals and you think about the things that go into iPhones, we're increasingly starting to have to think about ingredients in the things that we consume as opposed to just the things we consume. This is really quite something. Ian, it's good to talk to you about this. Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me. Ian Urbana is director of the Outlaw Ocean Project. The group's latest investigation is food for feed. It includes an interactive tool called bait to plate. It's a database that can help you track the seafood and fish meal supply change. And you can read more about this on the CBC News site at CBCNews.ca. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.