Blue empire: How Norwegian salmon undermines livelihoods in West Africa

Publisher’s Summary

Norway is the world’s biggest salmon farming country, with Norwegian companies occupying eleven out of the top 20 slots in the list of global producers of farmed salmon. From its humble beginnings in the 1970s, the industry has come to be dominated by a handful of powerful companies including the world’s largest salmon farmer, MOWI, which had a turnover of nearly €5 billion in 202210, and supplies supermarkets all across Europe. However, what is often presented as an exemplary corporate success story has come at huge costs which remain absent from Norwegian salmon companies’ balance sheets.

One such cost is the socio-economic harm resulting from the extraction of wild-caught fish to feed Norway’s farmed salmon. This fish would otherwise provide valuable livelihoods and nutrition in some of the most food-insecure countries in the world. This report exposes how the expansion of the Norwegian salmon farming industry has come at the expense of communities and fish populations in the Global South. While salmon producers tout their sustainability credentials, the industry’s inefficient and wasteful use of finite natural resources is driving the loss of livelihoods and exacerbating malnutrition in nations including The Gambia, Senegal and Mauritania. 

We argue that the Norwegian salmon industry is not so much leading a ‘blue revolution’ as establishing a ‘blue empire’. Based on detailed analysis of corporate and government data as well as the latest academic research, Feedback estimated the volume of wild fish required to feed Norway’s huge salmon farming industry. We found that Norwegian salmon farming has a voracious appetite and an enormous feed footprint, driving the extraction of nearly 2 million tonnes of whole fish from the wild every year. What is more, a significant share of its fish oil, a key commodity in salmon farming, is imported from Northwest Africa, a region facing acute food insecurity. 

Norway’s demand for fish oil is depriving up to 4 million people in the region of fish required to meet their annual nutritional needs. Faced with unfair competition from the global aquaculture industry, including major Norwegian companies, West African communities are mobilising to protect their fish and livelihoods; women, who play a central role in fish processing, are at the forefront of efforts to hold governments and companies to account. 

The plundering of African fish stocks by Norwegian companies, and the Norwegian government’s uncritical embrace of industrial aquaculture, stand in stark contrast to Norwegian development policy, which has identified food security and the fight against hunger as a priority area, notably in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as highlighting women’s central role in food production. 

This reflects a startling lack of policy coherence. By revealing the Norwegian salmon industry’s enormous feed footprint, this report seeks to highlight the hypocrisy of global aquaculture corporations, who claim to be helping feed a growing world population while taking precious resources from the Global South for export to high-income markets. Shining a spotlight on a critical part of its supply chain, this report exposes how the Norwegian salmon industry relies on extracting nutrition from Northwest African coastal and inland communities, threatening health, food security and nutrition, in direct contradiction with the Norwegian government’s stated development goals.

Reference

Read more here. See also the TABLE essay: Out of sight, out of mind: addressing the invisibility of seafood in food system debates