Farm Forward is proud to announce the launch of a new campaign focused on the global aquaculture industry in partnership with the Aquaculture Accountability Project (AAP). Formed in late 2025, AAP is an organization seeking to debunk the myths of “sustainable” aquaculture and reduce unsustainable consumption of sea animals. Building on our ongoing work on humanewashing and greenwashing, we are working with AAP to expose these myths that have allowed the fastest growing food animal sector to expand exponentially, even as it is causing irreparable harms to our oceans.
Fish farming is the factory farming of the sea. Like land-based animal agriculture, aquaculture uses high-confinement farms to raise fish in overcrowded, disease-ridden, and filthy conditions. In addition to causing widespread animal suffering, aquaculture has catastrophic effects on surrounding ecosystems, destroys critical carbon sinks, and has a high carbon toll. Massive amounts of (often illegal) drugs are used to keep diseased fish alive, deepening the crisis of antibiotic resistance resulting from overuse and misuse of antibiotics in factory farming. But these realities are obscured by myths carefully crafted by an industry that claims that fish farming offers a sustainable alternative to both wild caught fish and land-based animal products.
Fish farming emerged as a “solution” to the crisis of the depletion of wild fish populations, promising to reduce pressure on fragile wild fisheries. In reality, industrial aquaculture puts more pressure on wild fisheries, further depleting wild fish populations in ways that continue to imperil our oceans. With fish farming comes a high demand for small wild fish species (like anchovies and sardines) caught for farmed fish feed. Carnivorous species like salmon require large amounts of these feed fish, with recent research revealing that they may consume nearly six times their weight in wild fish before harvest.
Aquaculture has proliferated as a solution to growing demand for sea animals, when in reality, the industry has worked across scientific, policy, and cultural arenas to manufacture that demand. Fish farms now supply more than half of all aquatic animal products consumed worldwide. This rapid growth, rather than responding to demand, is driving higher levels of consumption of both wild-caught fish and farmed fish, deepening the crisis of the depletion of wild fish populations and ocean health.
Fish farms are disease-ridden spaces where massive amounts of antibiotics are administered to keep fish alive. Even with the high rates of drug use in the industry, mortality remains high as fish continue to die from disease and spread these diseases to wild populations. The overuse and misuse of antibiotics in industrial agriculture is a leading cause of global antibiotic resistance, and the aquaculture industry is no exception. Aquaculture poses a risk to human health, not only in compromising the efficacy of antibiotics for the treatment of human disease, but also in the health risks associated with consuming these fish.
Fish farming, in reality, exacerbates climate change. Feed production, energy use, and high mortality make aquaculture highly carbon-intensive, with emissions often exceeding poultry and pork, and many times higher than plant-based proteins such as peas or soy. Worse, the industry also undermines natural carbon sinks by depleting forage fish who drive ocean carbon storage and by clearing mangroves for shrimp ponds, turning key carbon reservoirs into emissions sources.
Consumers concerned with the sustainability of fish and crustaceans often rely on labels and certifications to ensure that what they’re buying meets sustainability metrics. As in the case of animal welfare labeling in land-based agriculture, certifications rarely reflect meaningful guarantees of responsible production and are, instead, primarily used as marketing tools to deceive conscientious consumers.
As the aquaculture industry continues to grow, it has never been more important to include this sector in our work to end factory farming. We are proud to be working with AAP on finding solutions to the problem of industrial aquaculture, from helping to empower consumers to make truly sustainable food choices to working with institutions to change their food purchasing practices. We hope that you will join us in this work. In addition to following Farm Forward’s work on this issue, you can also sign up for the AAP newsletter to get involved.