Do you think farmed salmon is the solution to overfishing? You think wrong

On Good Friday, many eat farmed salmon, which is often touted as a sustainable solution for the oceans. Unlike wild salmon, farmed salmon is farmed in aquaculture and does not need to be fished from the oceans.

But is farmed salmon really sustainable? And does it protect the seas from overfishing? The short answer: It’s complicated.

A new episode of “With open data” from the German-French broadcaster “Arte” shows that European farmed salmon is not the holy grail of fishing, even when it comes to environmental aspects. Findings of the study:

The biggest environmental problem is the food fed to aquaculture farmed salmon: salmon is a predatory fish, meaning it feeds on other species of fish. When farming, the fish gets its food in the form of fish oil and fishmeal granules.

And to produce this feed for farmed salmon, tons of other fish must first be caught – mostly far away from Europe.

Mauritania is one of the world’s largest fishmeal exporters. West Africa is rich in fish, but farmed salmon’s main food, golden sardines, has been one of the fish species threatened by overfishing since 2016.

Yet tons of golden sardinia are still caught, shredded in turbines, and processed into oil and flour. To then feed farmed salmon, which in turn end up on our plates.

Nouadhibou is the second largest city in Mauritania and has the largest port in the country. According to research by Arte, the very first fish factory was built here in 2005. Since 2012, despite all warnings, the port city has experienced a real boom in fish factories. Satellite images now show 28 factories, most of which are owned by investors from China, Turkey and Morocco.

Particularly explosive: for 1 kilo of fishmeal, the factories need between 4 and 5 kilos of wild fish. In 2020, the factories in Nouadhibou caught nearly 830,000 tons of fish – equivalent to two-thirds of the fish catch in Mauritanian waters.

To protect sardine stocks, an upper limit was introduced in 2015: the factories may not produce more than 2,000 tons of fishmeal per year. But almost no factory adheres to this quota, as evidenced by a document published by Arte. Some factories still produce 30,000 tons of fishmeal in 2017.

But not only the seas, but also people and the animals themselves suffer from the production of farmed salmon feed.

Arte analyzed the coastal city’s wastewater reports, which clearly exceed wastewater pollution limits. This could be explained by the fact that thousands of dead young fish repeatedly wash up off the coast of Mauritania, according to videos.

In addition, the food security of the local population is threatened, as the fishing boats used can collect up to 400 tons of fish from the sea per trip.

Once the wild fish is processed into meal or oil, 98 percent of it is exported abroad, mainly to China. But according to the Mauritanian authorities, 23 percent of the exported quantity ends up in Europe. This is despite the fact that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), to which Switzerland belongs, classifies the golden sardine in West Africa as endangered.

The main producer of farmed salmon in Europe is Norway. In 2022, the Scandinavian country raised 1.4 tons of salmon – and exported it all over the world.

Switzerland is also a buyer of farmed salmon from Norway. Salmon is not only one of the most popular types of fish in this country, but also one of the most imported.

How the farmed salmon was fed is not written on the packaging of most supermarket products – let alone where the feed comes from.

But organically farmed salmon is better, right? Unfortunately that is a mistake. According to the study, the organically farmed fish is fed 70 percent with fishmeal and oil pellets, while the conventionally farmed fish is fed only 20 percent. The rest of the food for the non-organic farmed fish consists of plant meal, which often comes from genetically modified cultures.

Arte concludes that every kilo of organic farmed fish contains up to 4 kilos of wild fish.

You can watch the entire show here.