Fishmeal & shrimp: Stocks
Catch quotas as reserves, and the Chinese port stocks traders watch
What this tab covers How much is left and how much is held. For minerals and energy: reserves, current output, years of supply and recycling for the top five countries. For farm commodities: production, ending stocks and stocks-to-use for the top five producers (USDA, October 2026). It also covers inventories and stockpiles.Recycling
Seafood is not recycled. Wild fish stocks are the resource base: FAO reported in SOFIA 2024 that just over a third of assessed marine stocks were overfished. Trimmings and by-products are increasingly reduced into fishmeal and fish oil rather than discarded. There are no public seafood reserves; cold-store inventories at importers act as the buffer. India has no stockholding policy for fish.
Fish are renewable but finite, so the relevant reserve is the biomass regulators allow to be caught. Peru sets anchovy quotas each season after scientific surveys, and cuts or cancels them in El Niño years. Fishmeal stores for months, and stocks in Chinese ports are watched as a demand signal. Importers hold frozen shrimp in cold stores. Wild catches have long plateaued, so growth must come from farming and fuller use of processing trimmings.