The Global Fight Against Industrial Aquaculture campaign is aimed at addressing the pressing challenges created by industrial seafood farming, warning against the further development and expansion of such operations around the world, and promoting that governments invest in long term solutions centering community-based and regional food systems. This is an umbrella struggle that bridges food sovereignty issues between land and watery environments (ocean, rivers, mangroves), and across all regions of the world.
The World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP) is launching a global campaign against industrial aquaculture because this model is causing widespread environmental destruction, social injustice, and violations of the rights of Indigenous Peoples and small-scale fishing communities. Across regions, industrial aquaculture pollutes drinking water, destroys freshwater and coastal ecosystems through salinization and waste discharge, fuels overfishing through demand for feed, and accelerates the enclosure and privatization of aquatic territories. These impacts are compounded by policy reforms and deregulation processes that favor corporate expansion while undermining customary rights, Free, Prior and Informed Consent, and community governance systems. Women and youth are disproportionately affected through criminalization, gender-based violence, loss of livelihoods, and erosion of community-based food systems. The expansion of speculative capital, privatization of access rights, and market-driven governance mechanisms—often framed under the “blue economy”—are transforming common goods into financial assets and reallocating power away from communities.
At the same time, WFFP’s campaign seeks to demonstrate that small-scale fisheries and traditional aquaculture practices are essential for food sovereignty, ecosystem resilience, and intergenerational livelihoods. Community-based food systems nourish millions of people, sustain biodiversity, and strengthen local economies while ensuring women’s leadership and youth participation in food production and governance. The campaign will also expose the corporate, financial, and policy actors—including global institutions and national governments—whose decisions have enabled the unchecked expansion of industrial aquaculture. By collecting evidence from fisher communities worldwide and proposing community-led alternatives, WFFP aims to challenge the dominant capitalist model of fisheries and aquaculture and to defend the rights of fisher peoples to their territories, cultures, and self-determined futures.
