An Open Reference for the Fishmeal Trade

fishmeal.org

2026Commodity handbookTrilingual glossary

fishmeal.org / Beyond / Raw sourcing

Beyond · B2

Raw sourcing

The resource question has four practical parts: who sets the catch, what the ocean does anyway, what the fillet plants throw away, and how efficiently it all converts.

Quota management

The world's largest fishmeal fishery is also one of the most tightly scheduled: Peru splits its anchoveta year into two regulated seasons, each opened by PRODUCE against hydroacoustic stock surveys, with per-zone catch limits published in the official gazette.[1] The system is blunt but effective at the one thing that matters — stopping the fleet before the survey says stop. Chile and the North Sea industrial fisheries run their own versions through national and EU quota machinery.

El Niño, the non-negotiable variable

Every few years the Pacific warms, anchoveta move offshore or deeper, landings collapse and seasons close early. 2023 was the demonstration case: global fishmeal output fell 23 percent in a single year.[2] No management system cancels El Niño; the trade absorbs it through inventory, price and — increasingly — alternative ingredients.[3]

By-products: the fishmeal that was already caught

Roughly a third to a half of some national outputs now comes not from industrial fishing but from food-fish processing: Vietnam's pangasius frames supply about half its fishmeal, and Thailand's trimmings stream anchors its industry.[4][5] Using the by-product is the cheapest marine protein in existence — no additional catch stands behind it — and nutrient-retention accounting credits it directly.[6]

Conversion efficiency

Fish-in:fish-out ratios have improved for decades as feeds sharpen and by-product inputs rise; nutrient-based accounting (nFIFO) makes the by-product contribution explicit.[6] The direction is the story: more farmed fish per tonne of raw material, every decade on record.

Reference R3Protein converter →
Sources
  1. We Are Aquaculture: first anchovy season 2026 southern Peru — weareaquaculture.com/news/fisheries/the-first-anchovy-fishing-season-202 (accessed 2026-10-24)
  2. Aquaterra Omega-3: Peru cancels anchovy season — aquaterraomega3.com/peru-cancels-anchovy-season (accessed 2026-10-24)
  3. FAO GLOBFISH species analysis — www.fao.org/in-action/globefish/species-analysis/fishmeal-and-fish-oil/e (accessed 2026-10-24)
  4. Howlader 2023 (PMC) — pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9982026 (accessed 2026-10-24)
  5. Liu 2020 (ScienceDirect) — www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352513420305627 (accessed 2026-10-24)
  6. SeafoodSource — Vietnam trading partner feature — www.seafoodsource.com/news/premium/supply-trade/vietnam-emerging-as-impo (accessed 2026-10-24)
  7. Just Seafood — political economy of Thai fishmeal (academic) — www.justseafood.org/from-trash-fish-to-fishmeal-production-in-thailand-h (accessed 2026-10-24)
  8. Newton 2025 — nutrient FIFO (ScienceDirect) — www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0044848625002182 (accessed 2026-10-24)
  9. Global Seafood Alliance — FIFO ratios improve (2017) — www.globalseafood.org/advocate/aquaculture-input-efficiency-fifo (accessed 2026-10-24)