As the global appetite for seafood grows, multinational meatpackers want to expand their protein production prominence to the seas. Last month, JBS announced plans to take over Australia’s second-largest salmon corporation, Huon Aquaculture Group, for $314 million (US). The deal stokes environmentalists’ and small fishing communities’ fears that the rapidly growing aquaculture industry will take the shape of consolidated livestock production, reaping profits for a powerful few while fouling the environment and driving out independent fishing businesses.  

“We have just a handful of companies in the world that are a controlling force when it comes to … food production on land and the thought of those same companies controlling space in the ocean for aquaculture and … [having] some control over the seafood system — it’s horrifying,” says Rosanna Marie Neil, chief counsel for the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance. “It could be the continuation of a disturbing trend.”

Fish farming, or aquaculture, is the fastest-growing form of food production in the world. As wild fish stocks decline and demand for seafood continues to grow, experts increasingly look to farm-raised fish to fill the gap. Major meat corporations looking to provide protein to the world have signaled interest in this booming industry. Now the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS, may be the first to dive in with its takeover of Tasmania’s Huon Aquaculture Group.

"This is a strategic acquisition," said JBS global chief executive officer, Gilberto Tomazoni, in a statement. "We will repeat what we did previously with poultry, pork and value-added products to make our portfolio even more complete." Brazil-based JBS is the top global producer of beef and poultry and a leading producer of lamb and pork, with several facilities in Australia. Australian antitrust enforcers are already investigating JBS’s takeover of pork corporation Rivalea, which it bought in April.

Other dominant meatpackers will soon follow. Competing beef and poultry packer Cargill has spent billions acquiring fish feed corporations. The corporation’s chief executive officer, Dave MacLennan, said in an interview earlier this year that Cargill is actively looking to buy fish farms too. “We want to further integrate in the seafood supply chain and we don’t own anything yet, but we are scouting for opportunities,” MacLennan told Bloomberg.

JBS and Cargill will be able to leverage their existing relationships with global distributors and major food retailers to make a quick entry into the seafood industry. Both giants are investing in industrial, vertically integrated aquaculture empires in the mold of their meat businesses. These tightly controlled and consolidated supply chains have pushed out smaller livestock farmers, and now independent fishermen fear that they’ll also be displaced by larger corporate farms.

“It will introduce more vertical integration in the supply chain; you likely would have a lot of the same companies that are controlling seafood production also controlling seafood processing, and that will have a restrictive effect on independent fishermen,” Neil says. “It would definitely create unfair competition with seafood that is wild caught; it could have a depressing effect on prices.”

Neil says the threat of seafood consolidation moves the industry in the wrong direction, especially after large seafood companies with complex supply chains struggled to provide food during the pandemic.  “What we found is that small- and medium-scale seafood harvesters and seafood businesses were the most resilient,” Neil says. She noted this was particularly true for those businesses with direct consumer relationships and local processing.

Further industrialization of aquaculture, fueled by agribusiness cash, also raises major environmental concerns. While farmed seafood can be a less resource-intensive and more climate-friendly source of protein, it all depends how it’s raised. Huon Aquaculture Group raises salmon in controversial open ocean net pens. High densities of fish stocked in these large floating pens introduce massive volumes of fish poop as well as antibiotics, pesticides, and other chemicals into marine ecosystems.

Waste from fish is a natural part of the ocean, but waste from hundreds of thousands of fish circulating the same small area can become harmful. Excess nutrient pollution from concentrated fish poop fuels oxygen-sucking algae blooms and dead zones, killing off ocean plants and animals. Farmed fish can also escape and threaten wild fish stocks by introducing diseases, competing for resources, or altering wild gene pools through interbreeding (a particular concern where farms raise genetically engineered fish). Because offshore net pen aquaculture generally requires large upfront capital investments and high-volume production to be profitable, this type of production favors larger, wealthy players and can further consolidation.

Huon Aquaculture Group is already a large corporation, controlling 40% of the Australian salmon market. Huon expects to harvest 35,000 metric tons of seafood this year from its vertically integrated network of salmon and trout hatcheries, 13 net pen farms, processing plants, and distributors. The corporation exports 15% of its production. It’s also been criticized by community members for polluting waterways, killing marine life, and threatening wild fisheries in Tasmania.

For example, industrial salmon development in Tasmania’s Macquarie Harbour, a world heritage site, resulted in an environmental disaster in 2018. Dangerously low oxygen levels, almost certainly due to nutrient pollution from salmon farms, killed over a million salmon and other marine life, including the rare maugean skate which is now near extinction. Upstream, Huon Aquaculture hatcheries have also been blamed for algae blooms on the Derwent River, which have deteriorated local drinking water and required some $175 million (US) in taxpayer dollars for water infrastructure upgrades.

Despite these events, the state government has backed plans to double the value of Tasmania’s salmon industry by 2030. Huon and other Tasmanian salmon corporations have been accused of cozy relationships with government regulators who greenlight industry expansion with little meaningful oversight. In fact, in early 2019 two scientists on a salmon environmental review panel resigned in protest after their concerns were allegedly ignored. “It was stated multiple times ‘the minister will approve it anyway,’ so it doesn’t matter what we say,” Louise Cherrie, one of the scientists, told filmmakers, in an exposé about the Tasmanian salmon industry.

Critics say JBS ownership will only make these issues worse. JBS sources meat from confined livestock operations, which are just as controversial and polluting. Investigations also show that JBS’s beef supply chain drives illegal deforestation in Brazil and the Amazon. Expanding aquaculture production into public waters also requires government permits, and JBS has a history of corruption. Executives have pleaded guilty to bribing government officials to secure sweetheart financing and export tainted meat.

Mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, an investor with concerns about JBS’s environmental commitments, doubled his stake in Huon after the takeover announcement in an apparent attempt to influence the deal. The Tasmanian Alliance for Marine Protection also opposes the deal, citing JBS’s shuttering of Tasmanian meatpacking plants funded with government subsidies.