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The dirty yellow powder’s underwhelming appearance belies its influence. Fish meal—an unassuming yet protein-dense powder of dried, cooked, and pulverized fish—has fueled South American oligarchs, fostered slums, reshaped ecosystems, and fed Europe’s agricultural industrialization. Fish meal propelled the global production of meat and eggs, all while spurring public health crises, pollution, and unrest. The precipitous rise and fall of this humble commodity in the mid to late 20th century, writes medical and environmental historian Floor Haalboom, offers lessons for today as fish meal’s star rises again.

Fish meal’s story as a propeller of global change begins around the Second World War, when European farmers pressured to feed a hungry continent took advantage of its nutrient density to fatten up livestock. In her native Netherlands, says Haalboom, fish meal transformed the otherwise petite nation into a powerhouse of agricultural exports. No longer restricted by their ability to grow livestock feed locally, farmers pumped out meaty porkers and poultry faster and in numbers well beyond what the land could sustain. Fish meal was the main ingredient in the fuel that turned farms into factories.

In the interwar period, agricultural science ramped up, with scientists striving to devise specialized livestock feeds to optimize animals’ growth. Strong fishing nations like Norway and the United States began churning the leftovers from processing fish like herring and sardine—fish destined for human plates—into fish meal and other products. In California especially, super-productive fishing boats and hungry factories triggered a crucial shift: they started processing entire fish, not just waste, into fish meal. Increasingly, farmers experimented with this potent new source of fertilizer and animal feed.

At the time, Peru wasn’t much of a fishing nation; its specialty was guano: nitrogen-rich seabird poop—an important fertilizer. But Peruvian industrialists saw opportunity in global agriculture’s nascent interest in fish meal and set out to create their own industry. Around the late 1940s, their effort received a major boost when California’s sardine population crashed. They imported American equipment and expertise to produce fish meal from the bevy of small, oily fish that thrive in the cold, rich Humboldt Current off South America’s Pacific coast: Peruvian anchoveta, sardines, and mackerel.

At the time, these fish were primarily being eaten by seabirds, not people—though international campaigns endeavored, mostly unsuccessfully, to solve hunger in Peru and abroad with products like “anchovy cookies.” Yet from a cold start, Peru’s fishing industry soared. In roughly a decade, the Peruvian anchoveta became one of the most harvested fish in the world, and Peru the planet’s top fish-meal exporter.

By 1958, European farmers, anxious about rising feed bills for their growing herds, were ready for the glut of cheap protein. Peru delivered. In the Netherlands in the 1960s, Haalboom writes, around 80 percent of the fish meal eaten by hogs and chickens came from Peru, whose bargain prices easily swayed Dutch farmers away from Scandinavian fish meal.

But in Peru, Europe’s demand for cheap feed was taking a massive toll.

While a few Peruvian industrialists, and at times fishermen, reaped the boom’s benefits—to the tune of roughly US $2-billion in sales annually in 2023 dollars—fish-meal workers, often Indigenous migrants, eked out a meager living in unsanitary slums. Rotting waste flowed from the plants into the bays of fish-meal towns, spawning oxygen-deprived dead zones. While Dutch hogs and chickens feasted on fish meal, Haalboom writes, Peruvians themselves apparently ate less fish, though which species is unclear. Regional farmers suffered, however, as access to cheap guano dwindled and fish meal sailed for Europe.

And during the 1950s and ’60s, Dutch public health officials, alarmed at rising salmonella infections, fingered farmers’ “radical” new feed ingredients as the potential culprit. A concerned Dutch microbiologist confirmed his fishy suspicions during a visit to Peru’s fish-meal plants in 1963—and observed pelicans defecating and vomiting into the open fish pits. Peruvian “fish-meal plants could only produce so cheaply because they were unhygienic,” says Haalboom.

As the fish-meal industry boomed in the mid-1960s, Peruvian experts started worrying about the anchoveta stock. They implemented a national quota to restrict the catch—which was routinely ignored. The Peruvian anchoveta catch peaked in 1971 at a staggering 12 million tonnes. And then it all went bust.

In 1972, an intense El Niño flooded the typically cool Humboldt Current with warm, nutrient-poor water. The heavily fished anchoveta population crashed—as did the Peruvian fish-meal market. By 1973, prices had shot up nearly 250 percent. BP and Shell briefly toyed with turning oil into animal feed as Dutch industrial farmers declared a “protein crisis” and shifted their pigs and chickens to soymeal. As with fish meal, this soy ended up mostly coming from the Global South. European farmers’ demands helped trigger a rush of Amazonian deforestation—a problem that persists today.

In Peru, the empty nets and idle factories sparked social and economic crisis. The military government under Juan Velasco Alvarado—who took power in a 1968 coup—nationalized and cut back the fish-meal industry in an attempt to stabilize it, worsening labor clashes.

An earlier reform of the left-leaning dictator included cutting a trade deal with the Soviet Union’s fishing industry to stimulate local fish consumption. But such policies, says Haalboom, were “exceptional and short lived.”

More often than not, writes Haalboom, “nondemocratic political circumstances in the Global South”—Angola’s colonial rule by the Portuguese or Chile’s command under right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, for instance—“supported … cheap fish-meal production for livestock in the Global North.”

For Haalboom, this history raises important questions about the extractive dynamics between the Global South and the Global North. “Who are we feeding? And with what and where is it coming from? And what does that do?” she says.

People in the Global North, she says, largely ignored the humanitarian, environmental, and economic effects of propping up industrial agriculture on cheap imported fish meal until the 1972 anchoveta collapse.

Fish meal, says Martin D. Smith, an environmental economist at Duke University in North Carolina who was not involved in Haalboom’s work, underscores how quickly globalization began complicating the ethics of consumers’ choices about what to eat or wear.

“It’s almost as if a consumer has to hold multiple PhDs in many different fields before they can decide which loaf of bread to buy,” he says. “The reason we put that on consumers is that our policy system has failed us.”

Smith also points out that the fish-meal industry eventually enabled the industrialization of another type of farming: fish.

Today, global markets are again setting their sights on cheap fish meal and its companion, fish oil. This time, fish—occasionally species eaten locally—are being diverted from West Africa, South America, and elsewhere to fill the bellies of pigs and farmed carp, tilapia, and salmon in countries like China, Turkey, Canada, and Norway.

A 2022 United Nations report suggests Chinese and Turkish aquaculture’s demands, combined with the overzealous demands of foreign fishing fleets, may be threatening food security in West Africa—especially in Senegal and Uganda, where local diets are being deprived of fish to produce fish meal for export. Outside of such cases, however, farmed fish such as salmon generally do not appear to be outcompeting people for the same small fish.

Still, though she was describing the mid-20th century, Haalboom’s insight rings true today: “The public health, ecological, and social impacts of fish meal—which were a consequence of its cheapness as a feed ingredient—were largely invisible on the other side of the world.”