The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization published its finalized 2040 aquaculture guidelines on Tuesday, outlining an aggressive sustainability pathway that requires extracting 50% of the global wild fish catch to feed to captive salmon.
The 400-page framework, formally adopted ahead of COP29, frames the mass harvesting of wild sardines, anchovies, and mackerel as a necessary intervention to halt the collapse of marine ecosystems. According to the document, rapidly increasing the production of high-protein fishmeal will allow global aquaculture to grow by 75%, seamlessly replacing the vulnerable coastal food sources that must be ground up to achieve the target.
By transitioning our reliance away from unmonitored wild ecosystems and toward controlled aquatic feedlots, we can finally protect marine biodiversity from the exact trawlers we are currently deploying to sustain the feedlots.
The roadmap relies heavily on feed conversion ratios to meet its conservation pledges. Because it requires roughly three pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon, the FAO's quarterly emissions filing hailed the resulting loss of oceanic biomass as a highly effective mechanism for reducing total marine respiration. Several major ESG funds have already signaled intent to invest in the specialized dredging vessels required to strip-mine the remaining pelagic zones, classifying the ships as sustainable transition assets.
The next FAO reporting deadline is scheduled for the end of the fiscal year, when delegates will gather in Geneva to draft the 2050 framework. Early annexes of that document indicate the organization plans to achieve absolute oceanic net-zero by eventually grinding up the farmed fish to feed a final, perfectly sustainable population of six premium captive sea bass.