The hidden costs of fish feed

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[upbeat jingle] 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 and 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, 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 and human rights, environmental concerns, labor issues. W- 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, um, using aquaculture or fish farming as the main source of seafood. In twenty twenty-two, we passed that threshold of more than half of all seafood eaten 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 kinda wanted to shed light on the at-sea portion of fish farming.

We're also eating a lot of fish, right? Global consumption of fish has, has more than doubled in the last several years.

Yeah, it is the protein source of the future generally.

Yeah.

Um, 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, um, is, uh, 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, um, rich source, not just of protein, but omega, um, elements that, um, 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... There-- It's, it's an enormous industrial