Additional reporting by Oriana Aguillon

Peru has the opportunity to capture high growth from the aquaculture and human health industries with consumers seeking to boost their omega-3 intake, although the industry needs to evolve to become more sustainable, industry executives said on a recent webinar. 

Despite a drop in the use of fishmeal and fish oil in aquaculture feeds, the industry will continue to grow and there is strong growth potential for omega-3 health supplements, said Gonzalo Caceres, head of fish oil and direct human consumption for Tecnologica de Alimentos (TASA), the world's largest producer. 

About 10% of Americans use an omega-3 supplement. That number is growing as studies indicate that these fatty acids obtained from fish reduce the threat of cardiovascular disease, according to a 2018 study by Harvard University. Most supplements come from the fishmeal and fish oil industry, although new supply sources from krill and algal oil are providing competition to this traditional industry. 

Executives have said on several occasions that the fishmeal and fish oil is transitioning to a specialty ingredients market from a pure-play commodity industry, where the emphasis is only on the cost of supply. As suppliers of ingredients to aquaculture and the human health industry, the industry needs to improve its sustainability credentials.  

"In the pharmaceutical industry, omega-3 has a lot of opportunity and demand, and there are a lot of opportunities to develop that," said TASA's Caceres. "We need to think of a better product."

The decline of aquaculture's usage of forage fish and the emergence of the human supplement industry means that the fishmeal and fish oil industries have been structurally undersupplied for years. The salmon industry has cut its reliance on both ingredients by more than half in the past decade and will continue to do so as companies start to invent alternatives from algae oil. 

The future of marine ingredients used in the aquaculture industry, like omega-3 human supplements, also partly depends on Peru's ability to achieve sustainable certifications for its main anchovy fishery. 

Peru will probably achieve sustainability certification by the end of 2021, based on the timetable of a fisheries improvement program (FIP), according to Cayetana Aljovin, the head of the National Fisheries Society (known as SNP in Spanish). Both Aljovin and TASA's Caceres spoken on a webinar that featured speakers from the Indian and Peruvian seafood industries. 

The FIP has an oversight committee comprised of feed producers Cargill and Nutreco's Skretting and the World Health Organization (WHO). Aljovin said Peru's industry is already highly evaluated by organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations' Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) for its management of the anchovy fisheries. 

Peru's fishmeal and fish oil industry is the world's largest, and accounts for $1.9 billion of revenue a year, said Aljovin. Peru accounted for 8% of the world's wild fishery catch in 2018, according to the FAO. 

The markets for both fishmeal and fish oil possess very different dynamics, according to TASA's Caceres. Fishmeal, which accounts for $1.5 billion of exports, sells over 70% of the total to China's animal protein market, including the aquaculture and hog industries. Japan is the next most prominent client, with 7.2% of the total. The $418m fish oil market is much more diversified. Both Canada and Denmark are the biggest buyers, with 17% of the total market each. Belgium buys 13.7% of the total [...]