A new report alleges poor animal welfare conditions on fish farms in Indonesia, one of the world’s leading producers of fish products.
Produced by Act for Farmed Animals (AFFA), a coalition of animal rights groups, the report features undercover footage showing fish in unsanitary conditions, living in crammed and overstocked pens, and being skinned and filleted while still alive.
The coalition also found live fish left on ice while being transported to markets and grocery stores, which it says leaves them subject to thermal shock, a process that keeps fish conscious and stressed for prolonged periods.
“Whenever you have large numbers of animals that are farmed in intensive and industrial conditions, you can expect that their welfare will be highly compromised,” said Carolina Galvani, executive director of international animal protection organization Sinergia Animal, one of the groups that produced the report. The others were Indonesia-based Animal Friends Jogja and photojournalism agency We Animals Media.
“We have seen it with chickens, cattle and pigs, and now we also know that fish farming, harvest and slaughter can cause a lot of suffering,” Galvani said.
The report comes as the United Nations recently found that global aquaculture production rose by 527% between 1990 and 2018. By contrast, global capture fisheries, the catching of fish from the wild, rose just 14% during this same period.
The majority of the world’s aquaculture, which is the process of farming aquatic plants and animals, takes place in Asia, with the burgeoning Chinese market making up more than one-third of the global industry. In Indonesia, aquaculture now supplies almost 60% of the fish consumed across the archipelagic nation.
The fish species identified by the animal rights groups in their investigation include Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), catfish (Pangasius spp. and Clarias spp.) and milkfish (Chanos chanos), three of the world’s most popular types of farmed fish.
Galvani said the report “proves that large-scale fish farming can have a lot of bad environmental consequences.”