- Until recently, Mauritania was a major fishmeal producer, home to the world’s second-highest number of processing plants, with the boom driven largely by lax regulations and the rapid issuance of permits between 2007 and 2021.
- By 2021, more than half of Mauritania’s total pelagic fish catches were being used for fishmeal.
- That same year, however, the government began introducing stricter regulations and strengthening enforcement of rules governing the sector.
- Only eight fishmeal plants in Mauritania remain active as of September 2025, according to Mongabay’s estimates, and fishmeal production has fallen by more than half since its peak in 2020.
NOUADHIBOU, Mauritania — On a busy weekday, the coastal strip of Bountiya in Nouadhibou, Mauritania’s second-biggest city, is eerily quiet. This was once the beating heart of the West African nation’s fishmeal industry.
“In 2018, it was so busy with trucks and people that you couldn’t even park your car,” said the director of one of 28 processing plants located in the strip, who spoke to Mongabay on condition of anonymity. Managers and owners of the plants were reluctant to speak on record criticizing government policies.
Most of the plants in Bountiya are now closed. Those still operating are struggling to survive. A government crackdown in recent years has made it difficult to access raw fish.
Fishmeal, sold for animal feed, is made by pressing, drying and grinding fish into powdered form. (A byproduct of this process is fish oil.) It takes 5 kilograms of raw fish to produce 1 kilo of fish powder.
“Until 2017, if you were selling your factory, they would call you a fool,” said a manager at another plant, who also asked not to be named. “But now you cannot sell. It’s a fool who buys.”
In 2017, Mauritania produced 111,866 metric tons of fish meal, followed by 124,961 metric tons in 2018 and 128,789 metric tons in 2020. A significant chunk of fish landed in Mauritania were consumed by the sector; in 2021 alone, for instance, more than 50% of the total pelagic fish catch went to fishmeal plants.
According to official data for 2023, the main export market for the country’s fishmeal and fish oil was China, accounting for 68% of the export volume. This was followed by France, at 12%, Spain and Denmark, at around 6% each, and Turkey, at 4%. Chinese companies are also major investors in the sector. “About a quarter of all new fishmeal factories in Mauritania are Chinese owned, and these appear to be responsible for a disproportionate scale of production,” according to a 2019 report from the nonprofit Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements.
According Mauritania’s Ministry of Fisheries and Maritime Economy, the eventual goal is a complete transition from fishmeal to processing fish for human consumption. “For us, fishmeal production is not value creation, it is destruction,” said Mohamed Ould M’Bareck, the ministry official whose department oversees the fishmeal sector. “If we continue with fishmeal like in 2016, 2017 and 2018, we’ll find nothing in the sea.”
An unregulated boom
Mauritania’s waters are unusually rich in pelagic fish — species that thrive in open water rather than the seafloor. This oceanic habitat is the focus of most commercial fisheries operations. Between 2000 and 2019, the annual small pelagic catch fluctuated between around half a million to 1.2 million metric tons.
Its fisheries benefit from a 754-kilometer (469-mile) coastline, a broad continental shelf that offers extensive feeding and spawning grounds, and the Canary Current, a powerful upwelling system in the North Atlantic Ocean that brings nutrient-rich deep water to the surface.
Since its independence in 1960, Mauritania’s pelagic fish stock has been exploited primarily by foreign factory trawlers, equipped with onboard fish-processing plants. The country itself lacked onshore fish processing facilities, until the emergence, in the late 2000s, of fishmeal plants. These offered an opportunity to partially domesticate the sector, and thus initially found favor with policymakers. They sought to take advantage of annual fish catch volumes that far exceeded what this country of just over 5 million people could consume.
The growth of the fishmeal sector accelerated in 2011 when the Nouadhibou City Council allocated the Bountiya strip to develop the sector. A year later, development also started at PK28, a coastal industrial zone on the outskirts of the capital, Nouakchott.
By 2015, 35 plants were authorized to operate in Mauritania. In 2021, the number stood at 44. This gave Mauritania, at the peak of the fishmeal boom, the second-highest number of fishmeal plants in the world, after Peru, the No. 1 fishmeal producer.
But since 2021, the government hasn’t granted licenses to any new fishmeal plants.
To source the fish, these plants relied on large, motorized pirogues, contracted from Senegal and often as long as 20 meters (66 feet), alongside industrial purse seiners, provided and operated primarily by Turkish companies that benefited from their long-standing experience fishing pelagic species in the Black Sea. These vessels would either fish exclusively for one plant, or supply several simultaneously.
The industry created 1,972 factory jobs, held by Mauritanians and foreigners, as of 2019, when production was around its peak. But its contribution to the economy was questionable, according to Harouna Lebaye, president of Mauritania’s Artisanal Fishing Free Federation. He suggested the reliance on vessels contracted from abroad kept the industry isolated from the broader economy.
“It’s a sector outside the economy, not integrated into it — it runs in parallel,” he said, pointing out that Mauritanian fishermen, who traditionally target non-pelagic species, particularly octopus, are largely excluded from its operations.
The excessive use of industrial purse seiners in particular brought mounting pressure on fish stocks.
These vessels took advantage of Mauritania’s broad definition of coastal fishing. Under Mauritanian laws at the time, industrial vessels up to 60 m (197 ft) in length could fish in coastal waters, provided their products were “landed and marketed from Mauritania.”
The first purse seiners arrived from Turkey in 2016, and their numbers swiftly increased, hovering around 50 in subsequent years.
With the purse seine fleet accessing rich coastal fisheries, including breeding and spawning grounds, fishmeal production spiked.
The impact was particularly striking for round and flat sardinella (Sardinella aurita and S. maderensis), which are preferred by fishmeal producers for their high oil and protein content. The stock of round sardinella declined rapidly from 2018, scientists found, following which flat sardinella also began to show signs of overexploitation.
A policy shift
The first sign the government was taking a tougher stance toward the industry came in its 2015 strategy for the sustainable development of the fishing sector. The policy document highlighted problems with the fishmeal industry’s “uncontrolled development.” Processing fish for animal feed doesn’t add as much economic value as processing it for human consumption, the document noted. It also drew attention to environmental problems and the reliance on foreign workers and capital.
The following year, the government introduced a token quota, limiting each plant’s annual raw fish consumption to 10,000 metric tons, which was to be lowered by 15% each year until 2019.
A May 2021 decree further tightened the rules and strengthened enforcement. The decree mandated vessels operating in Mauritania’s waters to be equipped with freezers to ensure the catch would be landed in good condition. It also required plants to have freezing facilities, or a contract with a provider. The aim was to ensure more fish was fit for human consumption.
The use of round sardinella, horse mackerel (various species including Trachurus trachurus, Trachurus trecae, Caranx rhonchus), chub mackerel (Scomber colias) and yellow mullet (Mugil cephalus) for fishmeal was banned outright. A year later, in 2022, the list was amended to include flat sardinella and bonga shad (Ethmalosa fimbriata).
The government enacted the measures following civil society mobilization against the fishmeal industry’s contribution to pollution and overfishing, alongside pressure from the European Union. Mauritania’s cooperation with the EU in the fisheries sector dates back to the late 1980s.
In December 2021, Mauritania renewed a partnership agreement on fisheries with the EU, which allowed the EU fleet access to Mauritania’s waters for an annual fee of 60.8 million euros (about $70 million at the time). The European Parliament ratified the agreement in June 2022, with the ratifying resolution urging Mauritania to stop “overfishing of small pelagics” and to “halt and phase out negative impacts” caused by the fishmeal industry.
In November 2022, Mauritania adopted as law a wide-ranging management plan for small pelagic species, which limited access to coastal waters: vessels longer than 40 m (131 ft) would be restricted to waters with depths greater than 30 m (about 100 ft), and those longer than 26 m (85 ft) to waters of 20 m (66 ft) or deeper. In addition, the plan forbade vessels, including pirogues, fishing for fishmeal plants from operating within 12 nautical miles (22 km) of the coast.
Mongabay conducted a survey of facilities in Bountiya, PK28 and the port of Tanit, combined with information provided by the ministry of fisheries, to ascertain the number of plants still in operation.
From the 30 plants in Nouadhibou, the ministry has withdrawn the licenses of six. But Mongabay found that a further seven facilities had been abandoned. Of the remaining 17, only eight were operational, while nine were found to be in a state of care and maintenance — kept in an apparently serviceable condition, despite not being in active use. As for the 14 plants in PK28 and Port Tanit, five facilities had lost their licenses, two were found to be abandoned, and the remaining seven were found to be in a state of care and maintenance.
Disrupted supplies
Plant owners interviewed by Mongabay blamed the closures primarily on the disruption of fish supplies as a result of the new zoning laws — excluding certain vessels from operating in designated zones — in combination with the authorities no longer tolerating the use of unspoiled fish for fishmeal.
“We used to contract Turkish boats, but they are all gone now, there are only three or four left,” said the director of the Atyfen plant, who gave only his first name, Mohamed. Atyfen has been in care and maintenance since late 2024.
This is borne out in data provided to Mongabay by the fisheries ministry, which show the number of purse seiners operating in Mauritania fell from 59 in 2022, when the small-pelagics improvement plan was enacted as law, to 40 in 2023 and 32 in 2024. According to Mohamed Lemine Areira, the president of Bountiya’s fishmeal factory owners, the purse seiners which supplied the factories in Nouadhibou have all but disappeared.
Excluded from coastal waters, the vessels’ operations appear to have become uneconomical. “There are not enough fish in waters designated for industrial vessels,” said Hamady, the manager of the Sinorim plant. (He said Hamady was his full name.)
Areira said the departure of the vessels was preceded by them accumulating unsustainable debt from fines for zoning infractions, alongside operational losses.
In the case of PK28, where none of the original 12 plants are operational, these difficulties were compounded by a lack of necessary infrastructure. “At the beginning, there were plans to build a port at PK28, with electricity, road access and landing facilities,” said M’Bareck, the fisheries ministry official. “But the necessary funding was not secured. The costs became unsustainable.”
The downfall of the sector was accelerated by the enforcement of earlier restrictions concerning the use of fish suitable for human consumption in fishmeal and bans on the use of certain species.
At the SFHP plant, trouble began in 2021. “They said that if a boat brings fish, everything that’s good has to be processed for freezing,” said the director of the company, who introduced himself as Atama. Freezing prevents spoilage so the fish can be consumed by humans.
“If you bring good fish to the fishmeal factory, they’ll fine you and suspend you for six months. It happened to us many times,” Atama said.
“We only have permission to use Sardina pilchardus [European pilchard] for fishmeal — as long as we freeze 20% of it, 80% can go to fishmeal,” said Levent Gülkaya, the director of Mahelturk, one of the operators in Bountiya. “For the rest, it can only be if the fish is damaged or decayed, and you have to get permission — it’s very complicated.”
With increasing prices of fish due to limited supplies, and with fishmeal plants mandated to invest in freezing facilities, fishmeal lost the edge economically. “If you bring a ton of fish for freezing instead of fishmeal, you’ll double your gains,” said Atama, whose company, SFHP, recently invested in building a new freezing facility in Bountiya.
Gülkaya said his company was also “focusing on freezing, not fishmeal. Observing trends, companies are gradually abandoning fishmeal for freezing operations.”
“The policy, in broad terms, is to gradually get rid of fishmeal activity altogether,” M’Bareck said. “That’s the vision.” He added the only activity permitted will be the processing of offal, the inedible byproducts left after fish are processed for human consumption, such as heads, bones and guts.
Patchy implementation
While the sector has suffered a severe blow — with fishmeal production fell by more than half since its 2020 peak to 59,158 metric tons in 2024 — production numbers still remain relatively high. It’s unclear to what degree the plants still in operation are adhering to the rules.
However, official figures suggest it’s not just waste fish and pilchards, the only species currently authorized for use in fishmeal, that are being processed.
Approximately 17% and 15% of the fish that went into fishmeal in 2023 and 2024, respectively, was flat sardinella, a banned species, according to a presentation given by IMROP, Mauritania’s state-affiliated oceanographic institute, and seen by Mongabay.
Cut off from supplies from purse seiners, some operators said they were still able to sustain scaled-back operations by relying on fish brought in by pirogues.
A manager from a plant that still doesn’t have freezing facilities, who asked not to be named, told Mongabay it was easy to procure “waste fish” from pirogues. “With the [bigger] boats, it’s hard to get waste fish because they always bring good fish. But with pirogues, it’s difficult to preserve the catch,” he said. “Pirogues always come with waste fish. We benefit from this fish.”
Asked about a potential lack of enforcement of the rules for catches by pirogues, M’Bareck said: “There will be follow-up measures to improve the conditions of pirogues, but there are also social considerations. The state will correct this later.”
While admitting that there are gaps in the enforcement of the law, he said that if the government wished to eliminate the sector overnight, it had the capacity to do so. “It would be finished,” he said. “But what would be the consequences? There are heavy investments in these factories, people employed.”
Banner image: Canoes stationed by Bountiya, a fishmeal industrial zone in Nouadhibou, with industrial purse seiners, including the Turkish-flagged Cinar Kardesler. Image by Josef Skrdlik.
New study maps the fishmeal factories that supply the world’s fish farms
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This story first appeared on Mongabay
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