Many in the aquaculture industry are dependent on fishmeal, according to the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration.
Production of fishmeal
The fishmeal production process and value chain
Fishmeal is a brown powder obtained after cooking, press drying and squeezing fresh raw fish or trimmings3 from food fish. IFFO has estimated that in 2009 pelagic fish was used in 75 per cent of all fishmeal production, while the remaining 25 per cent came from trimmings. Pelagic species are ocean fish that swim in schools and live in the upper sea levels. Their source of food is mainly plankton and most pelagic species are considerably fattier than other fish species. Historically, landings of fish have been around 90 million tons p.a. and about 1/3 of this has been converted into fishmeal and fish oil4, while the remaining 60 million tons are marketed as fresh, frozen and canned fish.
Fishmeal contains typically 60 to 72 per cent protein, 10 to 20 per cent ash, 5 to 12 per cent fat and has a high content of the fatty acids EPA and DHA; more commonly referred to as omega-3 (IFFO 2011).
Fishmeal in its basic form has been produced for centuries and usage has varied from production of fertilizers to salmon feed. Nowadays, fishmeal is used primarily in feed production. Fishmeal and fish oil production has become a very thriving industry as both fishmeal and fish oil prices have soared (see figure 5.1 for fishmeal price data).
The Peruvian fishmeal and fish oil producer Copeinca has illustrated how the value chain in the industry is formed.
Global production
Global production of fishmeal is concentrated around a few top producers; top ten manufacturers in 2007 made up approximately 80 per cent of the global production. Today Peru is the largest producer, China the second, Chile the third and then the Nordic countries Norway, Denmark and Iceland follow as the most important producers. There are approximately 300 dedicated plants worldwide that produce about 6.3 million tons of fishmeal and 1.1 million tons of oil annually from roughly 33 million tons of whole fish and trimmings (FIN 2010). The species used in production vary from region to region, but generally speaking it consists of small, bony, pelagic fish that has little or no commercial value as fish for direct consumption5 (FAO 1986). It is estimated that about 90 per cent of the fish species used to make fishmeal is “presently unmarketable in large quantities as human food” (Bose et.al 1991). See table 2.1 for an overview of the different species used around the globe.
The global fishmeal output has remained at 6 to 7 million metric tons p.a. for the last 20 years, while world trade has averaged around 3 to 4 million tons. Fluctuations in output and export level are naturally linked to variations in landings of fish used for fishmeal production. Overfishing and unsustainable fishery management has caused some of this variation, but the large deviations are mainly due to the El Niño phenomena.