Peru's first 2026 anchoveta season closed in August at roughly a quarter of its already-reduced quota, and fish oil prices, specifically the omega-3 grade salmon feed actually depends on, have moved further from fishmeal's price than in any prior shortage on record. This piece covers why fish oil and fishmeal have decoupled, what the historical pattern says about how long relief usually takes once Peru's catch recovers, and what producers should focus on for cost planning and cross-team coordination in the meantime.
Peru's Ministry of Production formally ended the first 2026 anchoveta season in the north-central zone on August 21, after a mid-August scientific survey found improving anchovy growth but still too many juveniles and persistently warm water to justify reopening. The season had already been interrupted repeatedly since a suspension in early June. By the close, boats had landed only around a quarter of the season's 1.91 million tonne quota.
The production numbers behind that closure are stark. Global fishmeal output ran 54 percent below the same period last year, with Peru's own production down 72 percent. Fish oil output fell 29 percent globally and 68 percent in Peru over the same stretch, according to IFFO data as reported by iLaks, citing Austevoll Seafood, the Norwegian seafood group that also produces fishmeal and fish oil.
Peru supplies close to 20 percent of the world's fishmeal and fish oil, so a season like this one moves global marine-ingredient prices more than a weak season almost anywhere else does. The question for aquafeed buyers now is how high prices can go from here, and how long the shortage runs before relief arrives.
The current event is also arriving quickly, and the forecast has kept getting more extreme rather than less. NOAA's Relative Oceanic Niño Index, the metric the agency now uses to classify these events, moved from -0.44 in February-April 2026 to 1.36 by June-August, putting it into "Strong" territory in about five months. At the same point in their own development, the 2015-16 event measured 1.33 and 1982-83 measured 0.92; only 1997-98, at 1.69, was running hotter than the current event is right now. NOAA's most recent outlook, issued August 13, puts a 69 percent probability on this event exceeding every recorded El Niño since 1950, and its current forecast trajectory points toward a winter peak higher than any of those three prior events. If that forecast holds, the relevant comparison isn't just Peru's second season this winter, it's whether conditions are still elevated enough by March or April to threaten the first season of 2027 as well.
Fishmeal and fish oil come off the same catch, but they haven't traded like it for years. In 2000, Peru's fish oil price sat at well under half of its fishmeal price. By 2012 the two were roughly at parity. By 2024, fish oil was trading at more than four and a half times fishmeal's price, even though both are cut from the same anchoveta.
This year that split has narrowed further, down to the grade. Omega-3 grade fish oil, the higher EPA and DHA content product aquafeed and nutraceuticals actually need, held near $4,000 per tonne from last September through April, then climbed in steps. By June, iLaks reported a price near $6,800; by July, Austevoll Seafood's own market data, also carried by iLaks, shows it reaching toward $12,000 to $13,000. Feed grade fish oil, the lower-spec product, barely moved off $4,000 over the same stretch. It isn't fish oil broadly that's repricing, it's specifically the grade salmon diets are formulated around.
The clearest way to see the longer pattern is to compare the two worst catch years in the last decade. In 2014, Peru's anchoveta catch fell to 2.26 million tonnes, and fishmeal hit $1,921 per tonne, a record at the time. In 2023, the catch fell even further, to 1.98 million tonnes, yet fishmeal only reached $1,653 per tonne, cheaper than 2014. Fish oil moved the opposite way: $2,419 per tonne in 2014 against $6,705 per tonne in 2023. Same fishery, a comparable shock, and fishmeal barely responded while fish oil nearly tripled.
The reason is what each product competes against, and it shows up directly in how salmon diets have changed. Fishmeal's share of Norwegian salmon feed fell from 18 percent in 2013 to 12 percent in 2020, as cheaper substitutes like soy protein concentrate took its place. Fish oil's share barely moved over the same stretch, 11 percent to 10 percent, because its EPA and DHA content is harder to replace at the volumes aquaculture needs. Tightening supply shows up almost entirely in fish oil's price rather than being split between the two, and within fish oil, it concentrates hardest in the omega-3 grade specifically.
Peru's second north-central season typically opens between November and January, and this year's opening depends on a stock assessment from the Instituto del Mar del Perú that hasn't been finalized. Austevoll Seafood's CEO, Arne Møgster, put a number on that uncertainty in August, as reported by iLaks: the season's normal quota of around two million tonnes could be halved at best, or reach zero in the worst case. Either way, he expects fishmeal and fish oil prices to stay strong through the rest of the year.
Even a strong second season wouldn't necessarily bring prices down quickly. Peru's catch recovered sharply in 2024, to 4.63 million tonnes, close to pre-crisis levels, but fish oil price barely moved that year, staying at $6,658 per tonne against 2023's $6,705. The real correction didn't show up until 2025, when the price fell to $3,412. Fish oil moves through processing and existing contracts before a bigger catch actually loosens the market, so there's a real lag between a supply recovery and the price catching up to it, something worth building into any planning around Peru's second season. That same relationship is easier to see with Peru's catch and fish oil price isolated from the other fisheries and benchmarks in the chart below:
A handful of other fisheries can offset part of the gap in the meantime. The clearest is the Iceland-East Greenland-Jan Mayen capelin fishery, which spent 2019, 2020, 2023, and 2024 at zero catch entirely and has only recently started coming back:
Initial 2026/27 advice puts the fishery at roughly 358,000 tonnes, a meaningful addition against a market that consumes around 20 million tonnes of fishmeal and fish oil combined each year, though nowhere near the 1.5 million tonne seasons the fishery produced through the 1990s. Blue whiting and Baltic sprat landings have stayed comparatively stable over the same period, so they aren't providing new supply to lean on.
On the substitution side, poultry meal and other alternative proteins cover part of the fishmeal gap, but fish oil is harder to replace at scale for the reasons above. Norway's VKM completed a favorable risk assessment on the genetically modified canola oil Aquaterra in 2023, and Mattilsynet opened a public consultation this spring on formally updating feed regulations to allow broader use, but new supply from that route isn't likely to arrive at meaningful volume before next year's harvest cycle at the earliest.
The tradeoff most formulations face is between ingredient cost and the fish's EPA and DHA requirement, and it isn't a free adjustment. Cutting inclusion levels to manage cost has a real, if delayed, effect on growth and immune performance, one that doesn't show up until well after the formulation change is already locked in.
Peru's second season, and whatever IMARPE's stock assessment says about it, remains the clearest signal to watch. Given how fish oil has priced through the last two comparable shocks, and given NOAA's own outlook now points toward a winter peak that could exceed 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16 alike, the realistic planning scenario isn't just a weak second season. It's conditions still strong enough by March or April to put Peru's first 2027 season at risk too, which is a longer window than "into 2027" implies.
The instinct is to wait for Peru's second season and see where the price lands. The data says that's the wrong signal to wait for. Fish oil's price took roughly a year to catch up with Peru's 2024 catch recovery, and NOAA's current outlook has this event potentially still near its peak into next spring, which puts Peru's first 2027 season at risk on top of this winter's. The realistic planning assumption, not the pessimistic one, is that fish oil costs stay elevated through the rest of 2026 and into at least the first half of 2027, regardless of what the second season delivers. Budgets, contracts, and formulation decisions should be built around that timeline rather than around the next headline out of Lima.
That timeline pressure also exposes a gap that shows up in a lot of production organizations. The team deciding how to respond to feed cost, usually procurement or feed formulation, isn't always the team that sees the consequence first. The Big Data Study Manolin worked on with Veramaris found exactly that link in commercial Norwegian farm data: salmon fed above-average EPA and DHA levels showed meaningfully better feed conversion, lower mortality, and better flesh quality at harvest, with more predictable outcomes overall. That connection is easy to lose when feed data and fish health data live in separate systems and separate teams. The organizations that handle a cycle like this well are the ones where a formulation change and its downstream effect on growth or mortality show up in the same place, not in two different monthly reports.
There's also a longer-run argument for treating this as more than a one-off shock. Climate research on El Niño frequency (Cai et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2019) points to extreme events becoming more common as ocean warming continues, roughly doubling in frequency since the 1970s and projected to keep climbing. Peru has now had a Strong-or-greater El Niño twice in the last eleven years. A sourcing strategy built around "this is rare, we'll absorb it and move on" rests on an assumption the data no longer supports. Longer-term price locks and genuine supplier diversification, not just alternate origins for the same commodity, are worth a real look now rather than after the next event.