Aquaculture was meant to save the oceans from overfishing — and, in many ways, it works. In Europe, it is celebrated as a sustainable solution, feeding millions while protecting marine life. But in Senegal, the same system reveals a troubling contradiction: people lack fish because their fish is being fed to ours.

Fish farming is the fastest-growing sector in global food production, generating over 160 billion euros a year. Half of all fish consumed worldwide now comes from aquaculture. Conservationists praise it as a model of balance: no endangered species, no overfishing, no bycatch. Regulated and traceable, aquaculture appears cleaner, greener, more humane.

But beneath the surface lies a quiet depletion. Farmed fish must be fed — and their feed is made from other fish. Nearly a quarter of all fish caught globally ends up as fishmeal, a powder produced by grinding dried fish. Four kilos of edible fish become one kilo of feed. To raise one farmed salmon, up to fifteen kilos of wild-caught fish are ground and dried. The result is an ecological irony: fish farms consume more fish than they produce.

Along the West African coast, this imbalance is most visible. European trawlers harvest small pelagic fish — once the backbone of local diets — and transform them into fishmeal for salmon farms in Norway and beyond. The circle closes when those same salmon reappear on European supermarket shelves, labeled sustainable, ocean-friendly, responsibly sourced.

In Senegal, fishing is not an industry — it is a way of life. Seventy percent of the population’s protein comes from the sea. Yet the rise of fishmeal factories along the coast — eight in just three years — has begun to starve the very communities that have lived in harmony with the ocean for generations. Many fishermen, unable to survive otherwise, now work for the same factories that dismantle their world.

This photographic series looks at that paradox: the silent erosion of a traditional balance between people and the sea, in the name of global sustainability. Between the promise of progress and the disappearance of a livelihood, the images trace the human cost hidden beneath the label of the “blue economy.”