Stop sourcing fish oil from West Africa – international organisations and academics call on the Norwegian government to regulate its salmon farming industry

In the wake of the publication of our Blue Empire report, this week we sent an open letter to the Norwegian government, calling on it to ban the salmon farming industry from sourcing fish oil from West Africa in light of the threat this practice poses to regional food security and livelihoods.  

The 39 signatories comprise organisations and academic experts from around the world.  Several of the African groups such as the Collectif Taxawou Cayar, WADAF, RAMPAO and CFFA represent the region’s small-scale fishing sector and communities which are suffering from the impact of overfishing, in part driven by the production of fishmeal and fish oil for the global aquaculture industry. Norwegian and international NGOs including Naturvernforbundet (Friends of the Earth Norway), the Environmental Protection Association of Norway (NMF) and Oceana have also joined the call to action.  

Humble beginnings… 

From the humble beginnings in the 1970s, Norway is now the world’s biggest farmed salmon producer, with Norwegian companies occupying eleven out of the top 20 slots in the list of global producers of farmed salmon.  The industry is dominated by a handful of powerful multinational corporations, including MOWI, the world’s largest salmon farming company, which had a turnover of nearly €5 billion in 2022, and supplies supermarkets all across Europe.  

However, what some in Norway view as a corporate success story, has come at the expense of communities and fish populations in the Global South.  

Norway’s ‘Blue Empire’ 

Our ‘Blue Empire’ report published earlier this year, shows that, as the world’s largest salmon producer, Norway’s salmon farming industry has an enormous ‘feed footprint’, driving the extraction of around 2 million tonnes of wild-caught fish each year to produce fish oil, which is fed to Norwegian farmed salmon. A significant share of this fish comes from food insecure regions, such as West Africa where food insecurity has hit a 10 year high. Our research calculates that the production of West African fish oil for the Norwegian aquaculture industry is depriving up to 4 million people in the region of fish.  

With this in mind, we argue that what Norway sees as a ‘blue opportunity’ is in fact a ‘blue empire’. The movement of wild fish from the Global South to feed salmon in the Global North which is then sold at a premium is creating a new type of food colonialism, further entrenching global inequity.  

‘The fishmeal industry is a serious threat to food security and the future of fisheries in West Africa. This industry plunders our marine resources to feed intensive aquaculture in Asia and Europe, when local populations need it for their own food. It is time that “the fish of the poor stopped feeding the fish of the rich”. Our oceans and our people deserve better!’  

Dr. Aliou Ba, Senior Ocean Campaign Manager, Greenpeace Africa

Adding to the absurdity, the Norwegian government’s uncritical embrace of industrial aquaculture stands in stark contrast to Norwegian development policy. In 2022, Norway’s Strategy promoting food security in development policy  stated that their overall objective was to “fight hunger and increase global food security”. In the foreword to the strategy, Anne Beathe Tvinnereim, Minister of International Development emphasized that while in sub-Saharan Africa, 70–80% of the population works in agriculture and fishing, “Paradoxically, these very farmers and fishers represent the majority of chronically hungry families.” Whilst the government is setting out admirable goals to fight hunger globally and highlighting the macrotrends driving food insecurity in Africa, they remain silent on Norway’s role, with the extractive business model of its salmon farming industry creating the very conditions they say they want to improve. .  

What we are calling for 

In light of these findings, we are calling on Norwegian policy makers to:  

1. Ensure that Norwegian companies’ activities and feed sourcing practices do not contradict its own development policy by mandating an immediate ban on the sourcing of fish oil from food insecure regions including Northwest Africa; 

1. Stop further growth in Norway’s salmon farming sector so that it remains within planetary boundaries; 

1. Mandate genuine transparency throughout aquaculture supply chains, including full disclosure of suppliers – from source fisheries upwards 

You can read our letter here:

Download the letter here.