New Investigation Spotlights Toll of Farmed Fish Industry

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

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Mina Kim (0:23)

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

We eat a lot of fish and shrimp in this country, and much of it is imported from farms. We moved in the direction of farm fish to reduce overfishing of our oceans. But journalist Ian Urbina's five-year investigation finds that relying on farm fish is worsening the problem of overfishing as it sweeps up vast numbers of small ocean fish to feed the farm salmon or other seafood consumers love. And if that weren't bad enough, the food for fish or fish meal industry also pollutes and uses forced labor.

Ian joins us now to talk about his investigation into the farmed seafood supply chain by his organization, The Outlaw Ocean Project, which he just wrote about for the New York Times Magazine. Ian, welcome to Forum.

Ian Urbina (1:11)

Hey, thanks for having me.

Mina Kim (1:12)

Glad to have you. So first, remind us what fish farming looks like generally. I'm imagining tanks or floating pens.

Ian Urbina (1:19)

Yeah, I mean, mostly they're floating pens, near shore, huge. Sort of shallow waters, a big net that hangs beneath and then the fish are there. And when they get fattened up big enough, then the net sort of rises and brings them to the surface and they're harvested on land. Also, ponds typically, again, typically coastal, but these are huge operations with millions of fish in each pond or net.

Mina Kim (1:50)

And we're eating a lot more fish this way, huh?

Ian Urbina (1:53)

Yeah, 2022, we passed this crucial threshold, where more than half of the seafood eaten globally was now coming from farms.

Mina Kim (2:03)

So what countries are the biggest players in the fish farming industry?

Ian Urbina (2:08)

In terms of farming China, it's kind of the biggest at everything, and quite especially seafood, because seafood is popular in Asia. So it's the biggest, but India is a major player. A third of all shrimp eaten in the US comes out of India now.

Canada is actually a big player. Scotland is a big player of salmon. Norway is sort of the heavyweight when it comes to salmon, which is one of the most popular type of farmed fish.

Mina Kim (2:35)

So why do we move in this direction of farmed fish? What was the promise of farm-raised fish, or how is it being marketed?

Ian Urbina (2:44)

Historically, one of the reasons it went from a small, localized industry to a global behemoth was there was rhetoric and probably genuine ambition that by raising more fish, more seafood, we could catch less. So there were worries about the oceans running out of fish. And indeed, right now, about a third of all fish stocks in the world are over-exploited at the brink of collapse.

And so there's real worry that we're overfishing the seas. And so maybe if we grow them instead, we could remove the pressure, but that's not how it's worked out.

Mina Kim (3:25)

Yeah, talk about how it's worked out, how we have to basically raise this farm-grown seafood by taking other seafood from the ocean.

Ian Urbina (3:37)

Well, I mean, first, it's important to distinguish two very different types of aquaculture of farmed fish.

One is the more popular type, and that's about two-thirds of the farmed seafood. It's the species that are especially popular, and they tend to be what are called fin fish or fed fish. So it's gonna be tilapia, salmon, shrimp. These are fish that you grow, that you have to feed. The other type of seafood farming is bivalve, so oysters, clams, mussels. And that's a whole different story. Those are quite sustainable and good for the environment, and those are not fed.

The big distinction here is that the more popular type of seafood that the world has gotten addicted to is a fed form, and it's become hugely industrial, so they're huge farms. And the industry at some point decided that the way that you can fastest grow and most efficiently grow this seafood is by feeding them certain ingredients. And one of those main ingredients, their protein source, tends to be not soy or other things, but rather fish caught from the sea and turned into fish meal.

Mina Kim (4:51)

Yeah. So small fish like anchovies, sardines, things like that?

Ian Urbina (4:55)

Yeah. Forage fish. These are, if you think of the marine bio system, the food pyramid, if you will, for marine life, these are smaller schooling fish that tend to be the main dietary source for the larger fish at sea that we might target, like tuna.