The Gambia, like many of its West African neighbors, has embraced lucrative fishmeal production. But the burgeoning aquaculture industry, widely hailed by conservationists as the best hope for halting ocean depletion, is polluting waters, decimating fish stocks and threatening the lives of millions of people around the world.
In this episode of "Lawless Oceans," Ian Urbina investigates the impact of fishmeal mills and foreign trawlers in West Africa, exposing how one-fifth of all marine life extracted from the sea ends up on the surface, to feed farmed fish. Also, why solutions aimed at combating ocean depletion might be accelerating the problem.
This series won the Digital Media Americas 2023 award, awarded by WAN-IFRA, as Best Podcast.