Summary:

This report identifies industrial salmon farming’s biggest financial backers and exposes the deeply troubling role global financiers are playing in creating a food production system – salmon farming – that is harming people’s food security, health and livelihoods, as well as extracting a huge toll on the environment.

The global aquaculture industry has experienced significant growth in recent decades; in 2022 the UN reported that the world now eats more fish from farms than is caught wild from the ocean.

Industrial salmon farming, the most profitable aquaculture sector, has mirrored this growth trajectory. However, a substantial body of evidence, including people’s direct lived experiences, reveals the massive damage that salmon farming is causing to food security, natural habitats and livelihoods. We also know that salmon
farming is negatively impacting wild salmon populations, already under threat from the climate crisis and poor water quality. In 2023 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classified global wild Atlantic salmon populations as ‘near threatened’ and reclassified UK populations as ‘endangered’.

As a result, resistance to salmon farming is intensifying around the world, driving restrictions and bans in several
countries, and forcing companies to reconsider their expansion plans. Despite this growing opposition, massive financial backing from multinational banks and asset managers, state pension funds and governments continues to flood into salmon farming, fuelling the consolidation and rapid expansion of an industry that urgently needs to be rolled back. European – primarily Norwegian – corporations dominate the sector, with the largest now operating across several continents. This report argues that by supporting this extractive industry, financial institutions are complicit in propping up a multibillion-dollar global operation which places shareholder profits over the food security of millions of people and the protection of the natural world.

Despite extraordinary future growth projections, the global salmon farming industry will hit ecological limits due to its highly extractive nature. The climate crisis will only amplify these challenges. Meanwhile, as the global resistance to salmon farming gathers momentum, further restrictions and bans on salmon farming activity will inevitably follow.

The conclusion is clear: it’s time for global financiers to turn off the taps and stop financing salmon farming.