In August 1963, the Dutchveterinarian Dan (E.H.) Kampelmacher stepped on a plane to Lima, the capital of Peru. His destination: smelly factories in Lima’s port city which ground up tiny anchovy fish from the Pacific Ocean into huge amounts of animal feed. Peru exported one fifth of this ‘fishmeal’ to the Netherlands, where farmers used it to feed their quickly rising numbers of chickens and pigs in new intensive livestock or ‘factory’ farms. […]
The ports of Lima and Rotterdam connected the ecosystems of Peruvian fishmeal plants and Dutch farms. […] [H]ardly anyone showed any interest in what the stuff was made of. Although Dutch farmers had started to refer to their new industrial poultry and pig farms as ‘landless’ at this point in time, they did not intend this phrase to mean their growing dependence on oceans rather than land. Rather, it characterized a fundamental change in livestock farming: in the postwar era farmers could increase their numbers of animals independently of the area of land they had for growing feed. The phrase ‘landless’ erased from view that these farms in fact depended on places elsewhere on the planet. […] [T]he fish, called “anchoveta” [were] from the Humboldt Current ecosystem […].
Fishmeal was invisible, despite its crucial importance for two interrelated major changes in the Netherlands and the global north in general: the rise of intensive livestock farming, and the unprecedented increase in the consumption of meat and eggs. […] How did fishmeal and its environmental impacts connect industrial livestock farming in the global north to its production places in the global south […]? […]
Shadow places are ‘all those places that produce or are affected by the commodities you consume, places consumers don’t know about, don’t want to know about, and in a commodity regime don’t ever need to know about or take responsibility for’. It is very similar to the ‘ghost acres’ concept used by environmental and global historians: the acres of land countries used elsewhere on the planet […]. Cushman analyses the rise of the Peruvian fishmeal industry as another case of what he calls ‘neo-ecological imperialism’: the ‘Blue Revolution’ […], to stress the connection between fishmeal production in the Pacific World and the rise of industrial livestock farming in the global north. […]
Fishmeal fed the twentieth-century shift to industrial livestock farming – the Netherlands was among the top three fishmeal importers internationally from 1954 to 1972. […] Animal proteins – and fishmeal in particular – played an essential role in this shift to industrial livestock farming […]. But for poultry and pigs, animal proteins were an ‘indispensable ingredient’ […]. Internationally, fishery landings tripled in the period 1950–1973 due to the rise in fishmeal production for animal feed. […] During the Peruvian fishmeal boom from 1958 until 1970, […] [t]he livestock sector started to refer to it explicitly as ‘Peru fishmeal’ […]. The Netherlands was the second-largest importer after the USA in 1955 […].
According to Cushman and Wintersteen, the spectacular rise of the Peruvian fishmeal industry was the result of […] international interest in the Peruvian stocks of small fish suitable for fishmeal production, interest from the USA in particular.
After the collapse of the Californian fishmeal industry shortly after the Second World War, industrial fishmeal plants in Peru were realised with American marine expertise, investments by American industrialists, subsidiaries of American companies like Cargill and Ralston Purina, and second-hand American fishmeal equipment and technology. […]
As a result, the Peruvian fishery industry changed radically during the 1950s. Rather than a being a by-product of fish canneries, fishmeal became its core focus. […] [A]nd industrialists moved in entire fishmeal plants from the USA and Scandinavia. These plants could turn 5.4 tons of fish into a ton of fishmeal at the peak of the industry […].
Angola exported fishmeal under Portuguese colonial rule (until 1975), and South Africa exported fishmeal during Apartheid (until 1994). In Chile the neoliberal dictatorship of general Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990) gave fishmeal industrialists free rein again from 1973 onwards, and Chile had replaced Peru as the major fishmeal exporter by 1980.
Social inequality was exacerbated […]. Fishmeal industrialists made enormous amounts of money, and stock exchanges in the global north enabled speculation on fishmeal. Simultaneously, workers in the fishmeal plants were poorly paid and lived in slums with no paved roads, running water or electricity, unhealthy conditions and polluted air. Fishmeal’s volatile market resulted in labour unrest during the 1960s in Peru, and during the 1980s in Chile. […] Many factories were moved to less-regulated places along the coast, taking the air pollution and resulting public health problems with them. One of these places was the city of Chimbote, which quickly grew into the largest fishmeal city of Peru, and became ‘one of the nation’s … most polluted cities’. […] One place impacted by the feeding of fish to farm animals was in particular in shadows: the marine ecosystems from which the tiny fish were taken, like the Pacific Humboldt Current along the coast of Peru and Chile. […]
The ocean ecosystems in the global south exploited to feed the industrial livestock sector in the north remained largely invisible. […] The disappearance of the Peruvian anchoveta also made the ‘protein crisis’ move north. The Dutch livestock sector referred to the ‘true emergency situation’ of the Peruvian fishmeal crisis as the ‘protein crisis’ (‘de eiwit-crisis’). […] But in 1972–1973 the Humboldt Current marine ecosystem created its own shadow places in both the north and the south. The extraordinary strong El Niño led to the sudden disappearance of the anchovy population […].
All text above by: Floor Haalboom, “Oceans and Landless Farms: Linking Southern and Northern Shadow Places of Industrial Livestock (1954-1975),” Environment and History, vol. 28, no 4. (November 2022). DOI at: doi dot org slash 10.3197/v096734 020X15900 760737202 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]
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