Hayek noted that it’s difficult to attribute soy consumption to individual fish species. But other research has found a rise in the use of crop-based ingredients fed to farmed salmon. In Norway, the world’s biggest producer of farmed salmon, 90 percent of feed ingredients were marine-based in 1990, but by 2020 that had dropped to about 23 percent . Advocacy groups there determined that 90 percent of the soy fed to farmed salmon in Norway comes from three Brazilian companies, each of which have sourced soy ingredients from illegally deforested patches of the Amazon rainforest. Other research has found that the shift to crop-based ingredients doubled the greenhouse gas emissions, per kilogram, of farmed fish in Europe and the United Kingdom from 2000 to 2020. “It’s trading one problem—marine exploitation—for another—land exploitation,” Cascada said
