Tinned fish is having a real global moment. The pandemic-era pantry habit has since turned into restaurants nationwide serving tinned fish straight out of the can. Domestically, sales climbed from $2.3 billion in 2018 to more than $2.7 billion in 2024, and Americans\u2019 obsession with sardines specifically is only accelerating: Americans bought $3.52 billion worth of shelf-stable seafood over the past year, and sardines have overtaken salmon as the second-most popular tinned fish behind tuna, as Grubhub reported orders of tinned fish tripled in 2025. The global tinned fish market was worth roughly $10.24 billion in 2024, and is projected to reach $17.97 billion by 2034. Canned sardines are a meaningful part of that worldwide push.<\/p>\n
\n
But the supply behind that growing appetite is shrinking fast. Morocco, the world\u2019s top sardine supplier, saw its fish landings fall nearly 46% between 2022 and 2024, and the reasons are feeding into each other. Because sardines are unusually sensitive to temperature, warming water as a result of climate change is pushing the fish into new territories further away from fishermen. <\/p>\n
The war in Iran, coupled with the effective shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz (through which one-fifth of the world\u2019s global oil supply normally passes) is driving up fuel costs. Fishermen now need to go further to catch the fish, just as it\u2019s costing them that much more to travel longer distances, and they\u2019re bringing back almost half the quantity as before.<\/p>\n
Rashid Sumaila, a professor and Canada Research Chair in interdisciplinary ocean and fisheries economics at the University of British Columbia, has spent his career studying fisheries, and how they navigate geopolitical forces. He said the combination is something he hadn\u2019t seen affect the fishing industry in quite this way before.<\/p>\n
\u201cSardines are very sensitive to climate change, and we know it here on the Pacific coast,\u201d Sumaila told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cWhen it\u2019s warm, sardines move from Mexico through the U.S., and Canadians see more sardines. They follow the temperature.\u201d <\/p>\nHe said Morocco\u2019s sardines are shifting, too, and he saw the same thing while on a trip to Portugal this summer, when he left his hotel at 2 a.m. for an early flight and the temperature was still 34 degrees Celsius. <\/p>\n
\u201cSome of that 45% drop is partly climate change, and partly overfishing, and other things happening to the ocean,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s just so much. You have pollution, plastic. Stresses upon stresses.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Iran war adds a second layer. While Iran\u2019s own waters are not a major sardine source, Sumaila said the war still reaches Moroccan boats through the price of fuel. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Iran war doesn\u2019t quite impact this directly,\u201d he said, \u201cbut indirectly it does, because prices are going up. The price of fishing, the vessels, the energy. It\u2019s crazy.\u201d <\/p>\n
Since the conflict began, Brent crude surged 10% to 13% after the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to shipping this spring, an event the International Energy Agency called the largest oil-supply disruption in the market\u2019s history. Sumaila said he heard the same complaint from fishermen thousands of miles from the Persian Gulf. <\/p>\n
\u201cThai fishers are feeling it,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can imagine Moroccan fishers, or fishers in Africa or the Pacific Islands, feeling it too.\u201d<\/p>\n
A global supply food chain risk<\/h2>\n
Warmer water and higher fuel costs interact in a specific way for Moroccan boats, Sumaila said, because the two pressures compound each other. As sardines shift toward cooler water further from shore, fishermen who once worked familiar nearby routes now have to travel farther to find them, exactly as fuel becomes more expensive and the yield becomes less guaranteed. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s more risky,\u201d he said. \u201cInsurance payments, security for people. The combination is really quite scary.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the whole region. If the fish are moving up, that\u2019s what we face,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt\u2019s like we\u2019re facing a double whammy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The same pressures are also reshaping how Morocco sells what it does catch. Frozen sardine exports have fallen from about 70% of the country\u2019s small open-sea fish exports in 2020 to roughly 23% in 2025, even before the war began. <\/p>\n
\u201cClimate change is a factor,\u201d he said. \u201cThe war is going to affect it too, because all the freezing is energy, and energy prices are going up while the sources are being reduced.\u201d<\/p>\n
This all means we\u2019ll be paying more to eat less, he said of his research of Canadian consumers\u2019 grocery spending on seafood. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis isn\u2019t only the fish we catch in Canada,\u201d he added. \u201cIt\u2019s fish coming from all over the world. All of it gets affected. The price dynamics show up in people\u2019s household budgets.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said affordability pressure isn\u2019t limited to lower-income countries, even if it hits hardest there: \u201cIt\u2019s not only in the developing world. We all feel it. I don\u2019t go to any meeting these days where somebody isn\u2019t talking about the cost of groceries.\u201d<\/p>\n
A fish called subsidies<\/h2>\n
Government fuel subsidies make the underlying problem worse, even if not all subsidies are bad. Public spending on fish stock research and fisheries management is useful, but paying for fuel is a different story. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf you pay for fuel, that just makes people fish more than they would,\u201d he said. His team\u2019s most recently published estimate puts global fisheries subsidies at $35.4 billion in 2018, with $22.2 billion of that classified as capacity-enhancing subsidies that fuel overfishing, which shrinks fish populations further and forces boats to travel even farther for a shrinking catch. <\/p>\n
Sumaila has a running joke about it, borrowed from an old British comedy about a heist gone wrong. \u201cA fish called subsidies,\u201d he said, referencing \u201cA Fish Called Wanda.\u201d \u201cA third of your fish is actually subsidized and illegally caught.\u201d<\/p>\n
Outside of Morocco, both Portugal and Spain are trying to mitigate this as well. Portugal\u2019s 2026 sardine season reopened in May with a national catch limit of 33,446 tonnes, nearly 1,000 tonnes fewer than the year before. Portugal closed its purse-seine sardine fishery for the final weeks of 2025 after its fleet worked through roughly two-thirds of the combined Portugal-Spain quota. Spain\u2019s own 2026 quota came in nearly 3% lower than the prior year, yet the fishery still fetched stronger prices, with sardines selling for an average of 1.50 euros a kilogram, 50 cents above 2024 levels.<\/p>\n
To combat the less fish but sold for more money scenario playing out in Spain, Morocco put an export ban on frozen sardines, meant to protect domestic supply and stabilize prices at home. Sumailia had little hope in this working, basing his prediction on the ongoing trade fights between the U.S. and Canada. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you ban fish, maybe in the short term you have some relief,\u201d he said. \u201cBut that triggers a lot of other things you might not even perceive when you do it. You get a counter reaction, and a counter reaction to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of all, he said, sardines are one of the primary food sources for lower-income individuals.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you shut off these consequences, you\u2019re affecting small-scale people,\u201d he said, referencing the emigration of fishermen from Morocco to Portugal. \u201cPeople move. And then you have immigration. Where is this coming from? It\u2019s coming from things like the war in Iran, too.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
#Climate #change #war #Iran #force #sardine #shortage #Moroccos #sardine #landings #halved<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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