This year two numbers moved in opposite directions, and the industry has not caught up with what that means. In June, FAO reported that aquaculture produced 103 million tonnes of aquatic animals in 2024. That was the first time it passed 100 million tonnes, and farmed fish now make up 53 percent of all aquatic animal production. In October, IFFO, the marine ingredients organisation, said global fishmeal supply in 2026 will probably fall below 4.6 million tonnes, the lowest since 2016. It expects fish oil to land around 1.15 million tonnes, also a ten-year low.

So the farms are growing and one of their most important raw materials is shrinking. Every feed mill already knows this. The farmers who will pay for it, mostly in Asia, Africa and Latin America, are only starting to feel it.

A shortage that starts in the sea off Peru

Most of the shortfall comes from one place. Peru’s anchoveta normally supplies about a fifth of the world’s fishmeal and fish oil, and 2026 has been a hard year there. Warm El Niño water pushed the anchoveta deeper and further south, and catches had a high share of juveniles. By late June the first season in the north-central zone had landed only 471,111 tonnes, about a quarter of its 1.91 million tonne quota. In early October, local media reported that after a meeting between the ministry, industry and the marine institute IMARPE, the second season is not expected to open at all. The ministry had not yet confirmed this officially.

IFFO’s figures show what that looks like in the feed mill. In the countries it surveys, fishmeal output so far this year is down 45 percent on 2025 and fish oil is down 26 percent. Peru’s anchoveta stocks have recovered before and will likely recover again. But an industry that adds millions of tonnes of farmed fish every year cannot plan around a raw material that can lose half its volume in one bad El Niño.

Demand does not wait for the anchoveta

Demand keeps rising whatever the catch. In a new report, Rabobank models how a changing species mix in China could affect marine ingredients. Under its baseline scenario China alone could need about 700,000 tonnes more fishmeal and 80,000 tonnes more fish oil over the next decade. The main driver is not salmon but carnivorous freshwater fish such as largemouth bass and snakehead, some of which need more fishmeal than salmon does. Rabobank stresses that these are modelled estimates, not forecasts. The direction is still clear: fish-eating species are growing faster than the fishmeal supply.

This is why the series keeps saying aquaculture is more than salmon in Norway. The future of feed will be decided by Chinese bass ponds, Indian shrimp farms and Nigerian catfish tanks at least as much as by Norwegian sea cages. Those farmers have much less room to absorb a price rise.

Who pays when feed gets dearer

For a large integrated salmon company, a jump in fishmeal prices is a margin problem. For a smallholder it can decide whether the next crop gets stocked at all. In Andhra Pradesh, India’s biggest shrimp-farming state, farmers told the fisheries secretary this year that feed makes up nearly 70 percent of their production costs. In Nigeria, catfish farmers already face expensive maize and a weak naira, and higher marine ingredient prices are added on top. Whatever the feed mill pays for raw material ends up in the farmer’s pond.

There are local efforts to break that dependence. In Kenya, a feed plant with a capacity of 8 tonnes per hour, run on geothermal power, is planned for the KenGen Green Energy Park in Olkaria. In Accra, a Ghanaian–Danish partnership is building an insect protein facility to process 8,000 tonnes of organic waste a year into feed ingredients. These are the right moves. They are also small next to the size of the gap.

The awkward question of where the fishmeal comes from

There is a second problem behind the price. This month the Outlaw Ocean Project published its investigation into the global fishmeal trade, covering more than 1,000 factories in 64 countries. Much of it focuses on West Africa. In Senegal, The Gambia and Mauritania, small pelagic fish that used to feed local people are increasingly ground into meal for export. The reporters also found that at least 80 of the plants they examined were certified by MarinTrust, and that concerns had been raised about almost all of them.

Readers can judge the investigation for themselves, and certifiers will answer for their own schemes. The basic point should not be controversial: a certificate shows that a system was audited on a given day. It does not prove the whole supply chain behind it is clean. When a shortage pushes buyers to new suppliers, the gap between those two things gets wider.

What the shortage means for quality and food safety

The shortage is also a food-safety and compliance issue, and this side gets the least attention. When fishmeal runs short, mills change recipes. They use more poultry by-products, more plant protein, insect meal, fish trimmings, and meal from new and less familiar suppliers. Each switch brings its own hazards: mycotoxins in plant ingredients, Salmonella in animal by-products, heavy metals and other contaminants that depend on the substrate, and plain fraud in a seller’s market. A farm or processor whose HACCP plan treats feed as a trusted input from one known supplier is working on old assumptions. Supplier approval, certificates of analysis that are actually checked, traceability back to the raw material, and a review of the hazard analysis every time the formula changes are no longer extras. Buyers in the EU, the US and Japan will ask about them, and standards such as ASC’s feed requirements and BAP’s feed mill standard already expect them. Being able to show where your feed comes from is now part of market access.

Growth needs a feed plan

Aquaculture has done what the world asked of it. It now produces more aquatic animals than all the world’s fishing fleets combined. But too much of that growth still depends on a raw material that comes from a handful of coastlines and goes up and down with ocean temperatures. The shortage of 2026 will pass, as earlier ones have. The structural problem will not, unless the industry takes it as seriously as disease or market access.

That means steady investment in local, safe alternative proteins, honest checks on where marine ingredients come from, and feed safety treated as part of food safety. Shrimp farmers in Andhra Pradesh, who spend most of their production costs on feed, need that more than anyone. So do the tilapia and catfish farmers in Kisumu and Lagos.