34 MARCH 2024 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WAS.ORG and environmental factors, among others. Feed companies create these unique formulations because their customers can request specific nutrients, such as proteins, oils, or amino acids. Tracing an animal feed is understandably difficult because it can include 50 to 75 ingredients that are sourced from up to 100 to 200 different suppliers across ingredient types. There is growing momentum for companies that buy animal feed and final animal products to have accountability for their Scope 3 emissions. Many ingredients, including soy, palm, and rapeseed, can jeopardize natural habitats’ carbon sink potentials through deforestation and conversion. Measuring those embedded emissions is critical in mitigating climate change. Beyond environmental considerations, there are concerns about human rights and labor conditions that are more acute for specific ingredient types, like some marine ingredients. Companies cannot address any of these issues without having a better grasp on where all the ingredients in their feed come from and how they are produced. Feed and Aquaculture The aquaculture industry has attempted to address the sustainability risks of its feed in the past and continues to prioritize improvements in this crucial component of operations. Efforts to mitigate the risk of overfishing of pelagic fish for fishmeal and fish oil led the salmon aquaculture industry and its feed companies to spend a decade to address anti-nutritional issues in soy meal, so that it could help reduce the use of fishmeal in salmon feed. Unfortunately, there were unintended consequences. Some of the alternatives introduced, such as soy concentrate, were subsequently linked to deforestation and habitat conversion in Brazil. Trimmings used for fishmeal or oil had come from some fisheries, like tuna, where forced or bonded labor was found. The increased scrutiny about the way raw material ingredients in feed are produced or caught has also led to the production and marketing of several novel protein ingredients to replace higher risk commodities. The aquaculture sector encourages the development of novel feed ingredients as nutritional substitutes. Some of these products’ scalability and price competitiveness are making them attractive alternatives. Many of these novel proteins are produced under strict confidentiality around intellectual property which also creates a challenge for transparency of their liabilities and impacts. These novel ingredients foster hope for technological solutions for negative impacts involved in the current production of commodities and other ingredients. However, making the decision to use these products must come with the same scrutiny of impact as applied to other ingredients to ensure one impact is not simply traded for another, as was the case of fishmeal and soy. Scaling up of these novel ingredients should not contribute to new risks. Also, feed companies and aquaculture producers must contend with novel feed ingredients that have popularity but may not be suitable for cost competitiveness, which could increase confusion and degrade the image of the producers trying to find suitable and economically viable alternatives. The risks that feed ingredient companies pass on to feed companies are risks embedded in the aquaculture products sold to retail and food service companies. These risks cannot simply be displaced with certification. Rather it is the ingredient suppliers and the feed companies that need to go on the record to inform their customers of what level of risks their products carry. This information will help allow their customers to collaboratively make informed choices which will contribute to long-term improvements. As momentum builds for companies to understand the impacts of the entirety of their value chain, retail and food service companies
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