On 10 June 2026, the Peruvian government made a decision it knew would hurt one of the world’s major fishing industries. It barred all anchoveta fishing boats from leaving port, suspending the fishing season. The order was initially temporary, but by mid-August the suspension had become a total closure. This was no easy call. For one thing, it dealt a brutal blow to the Peruvian economy.
Peruvian anchovies — scientifically known as Engraulis ringens — are not the salty, punchy little fillets used in puttanesca sauce or caesar dressing. That is a different species, Engraulis encrasicolus, which is smaller, tastier and found mostly in the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Only a small share of Peru’s anchoveta catch is eaten as fish. The rest — more than 90% — is processed immediately into fishmeal and fish oil, packed into sacks and barrels, and shipped to fish, shellfish and seaweed farms, factory farms and nutritional supplement producers around the world.
The anchoveta industry is concentrated almost entirely off the coast of north-central Peru, and it is hard to overstate how economically important this fish is. By weight, Peruvian anchoveta have accounted for about a tenth of the entire global commercial fishing catch since 1970 — more than any other fish. In some years, the catch is worth close to $3bn and directly employs almost 50,000 people, or close to a quarter of a million when indirect jobs are included. Peru’s central bank forecasts a 30.7% contraction in the fishing sector and about 78,000 job losses in 2026, plus another 44,000 in 2027.
The effects will be felt far beyond Peru’s borders. The country is by far the world’s most important exporter of fishmeal — a crucial input for aquaculture and livestock farming almost everywhere — and prices are soaring as a result. This anchoveta closure will directly affect jobs, food supplies and supermarket prices worldwide. Peru’s then minister of production, César Quispe Luján, defended the decision as the only option: “The government has the responsibility to manage marine resources based on scientific criteria, timeliness and a long-term vision. When there is a need to strengthen conservation measures, it is necessary to act with prudence and responsibility to ensure the sustainability of the fishery.”
When the June suspension was announced, the fishing boats had already been back in port for weeks. At the start of the season in early April, Peru’s ministry of production had set a total allowable catch of 1.9m tonnes. But in May it closed the fishery for 15 days, with only 24% of the quota harvested. When the closure was extended to a full shutdown, there were even hints that there would be no second fishing season this autumn. The main concern of the Instituto del Mar del Perú, which recommended the closure, was the risk already posed by this year’s El Niño, and fear of what is to come.
We are heading into what global climate models forecast as the most severe El Niño since the 1880s, the earliest period for which we have accurate records. The super El Niño that is developing “may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin,” climatologist Zeke Hausfather said in July. Peru’s anchoveta population was already down before the suspension of fishing. We cannot know how the anchoveta would have fared without El Niño, but we know its presence makes things considerably more volatile. The warmer waters produced by El Niño threaten the plankton on which anchoveta feed, which in turn threatens the anchoveta population.
The oceans, which cover 71% of the Earth’s surface, are among the most gloriously alive parts of the planet. While there are vast oceanic deserts, there are also marine versions of the Amazon basin and the Okavango Delta. These rich zones are the result of a host of wonderful contingencies: the shape of the continents, the force of gravity,The chemistry of the ocean and the complex network of ocean currents.
Most years, the Humboldt Current, which flows north along the west coast of Chile and Peru, creates the most fertile fishing grounds on Earth. The current drives massive upwellings of cold, deep water that bring nutrients up from the depths, creating some of the most biologically productive zones in the ocean. This extraordinary abundance amazed the first Europeans who saw it. Islands were piled tens of metres deep with guano from countless birds feeding on sea life; the ocean boiled with million-tonne shoals of anchovy and sardine; tuna, bonito and mackerel practically leaped from the water. By comparison, today’s Humboldt Current system is much poorer – industrialised extraction has taken its toll – but even so, it remains exceptionally productive. Intensive commercial fishing continues, and the most intensive of all targets Peruvian anchoveta, 15cm flashes of big-eyed, blue-backed silver.
In an average year, Peru produces 20% of the world’s fishmeal. But the word “average” hides the extraordinary volatility of the anchoveta catch in the decades since the fishery was fully commercialised after the Second World War. In 1970, Peru landed more than 12m tonnes of anchoveta. In 1973, the catch fell by 88%. The shock of this stock collapse was so existential for Peru that the military dictatorship introduced the first regulatory regime for the anchoveta fishery. In 1984, the catch plummeted again, to less than 100,000 tonnes, a fraction of what it had been 15 years earlier. The catch recovered in 2000 to about 9.6m tonnes, but has declined since then. Recent annual catches have been in the 2m-4m tonne range.
Overfishing has played a crucial role in this ecological and economic rollercoaster ride. But the wild swings of the anchoveta fishery are not merely a story of rapacious industrial extraction; they also show how overfishing combines with bouts of accelerated ocean warming driven by El Niño, which always hit Peruvian coastal waters especially hard.
El Niño (“the little boy”) is the name fishermen gave four centuries ago to periods of unusually warm water off the coast of western South America. It is so named because the episodes usually peak around Christmas.
Like most oceanic and atmospheric dynamics, both El Niño and the anchoveta fishery are partly born of the fact that the Earth is a spinning ball, turning on an axis that runs through the middle of the planet from pole to pole. Since the ball rotates at a fixed rate, different latitudes on its surface spin at different speeds: in one Earth day, places near the equator have much farther to travel to complete a full rotation than places near the poles, so they rotate faster. Vancouver, the city where I live, is moving around Earth’s axis at 1,100km an hour. If you are reading this in London, you are a little closer to the north pole, so spinning a little slower (1,042km/h), but if you are in Jakarta, near the equator, you are whirling about at 1,665km/h. Had someone granted Patsy Cline her wish to Stop the World and Let Me Off, she would have shot out of Nashville at 1,350km/h.
View image in fullscreen
An anchovy fishing boat off the coast of Lima. Photograph: Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images
If everything on Earth’s surface simply stayed where it was relative to everything else, things might be fairly straightforward, but that is not how it works. While the solid parts of the Earth spin at a constant rate and in the same direction, its fluid parts – its molten core, the atmosphere and the oceans – can move at different speeds and in different directions. Often, from our perspective on the surface, it seems as though the fluid parts are somehow moving against the direction of spin. The easterly trade winds of the tropics, for example, which have carried ships across the oceans for as long as we have saThe seas are shaped by atmospheric patterns created by the planet’s eastward rotation and the faster rotational speeds near the equator. From one perspective, you could even call these “winds” an illusion: it’s not the air blowing past us, but we who are racing through slower-moving air.
Among the most fundamental fluid dynamics caused by Earth’s spin are ocean circulation patterns. These include the planet’s five massive oceanic gyres: two each (north and south of the equator) in the Atlantic and Pacific, and one in the Indian Ocean. These gyres are large circular systems of currents that span each ocean from coast to coast and from the poles almost all the way to the equator, and they too are partly created by Earth’s roundness and rotation.
The gyres in both hemispheres are like vast oceanic gears spinning in opposite directions: the northern gyres rotate clockwise, while the southern gyres turn anticlockwise. In the Atlantic and Pacific, they meet at the equator, driving wind and water westwards. Along the eastern side of all these gigantic rotating marine gears, cold waters move from the poles toward the equator: the Humboldt current is the South Pacific’s version of this process. As these currents push up against the oceans’ eastern coastlines, they are driven toward the surface, bringing nutrient-rich cold water to the pelagic zone. In non-El Niño or “neutral” years, the Humboldt current runs all the way up to the seas off northern Peru, where the anchoveta and everything else feast.
During El Niño events, the trade winds weaken and atmospheric pressure builds up over the coasts of Asia. As a result, warmer water spreads eastwards. With milder El Niño events, it reaches into the central Pacific, south of Hawaii, but in stronger phases it piles up off equatorial South America. Warmer water, much less hospitable to anchoveta, is driven south along the coast into the Humboldt current system, sometimes as far as Lima, Peru, 12 degrees south of the equator. There it sits at the surface, pushing the colder water into the depths and severely limiting the upwelling flows that bring nutrients to the upper layers of the ocean.
For the anchoveta and everything above it in the food web, the result is a disaster. The warm surface waters have the devastating double effect of shrinking the area of ocean where anchoveta find suitable habitat and robbing them of their main food source, the plankton that depend on the nutrients carried by upwelling. Anchoveta populations shrink, sometimes dramatically; birds starve, predators higher up the food chain that rely on anchoveta scatter or die; and there are far fewer fish for the fishing fleet to catch.
Every massive crash in the anchoveta fishery is the consequence of a severe El Niño event hitting already intensely exploited stocks. The climate crisis increases ocean temperatures and acidification, all of which is bad for most marine life, anchoveta included, and further worsens the situation by intensifying El Niño.
In its latest report on the state of the world’s marine fisheries in 2025, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization deemed more than a third to be overfished, meaning harvests exceed the rate of reproduction. Though the report classifies most anchoveta stocks in Peru as “maximally sustainably fished,” it is worth remembering that calling a fishery sustainable does not take into account that populations are at historically low levels—and, since the onset of industrial fishing, are more vulnerable than ever before.
As with many other shrinking natural resources, what brought us to this point is a combination of increasingly efficient technology and too little regulation for too long. In the case of anchoveta, as regulation has increased, fishing technology has also adapted itself to the behavior of the fish. The anchoveta disperse at nightDuring the day, when predators like tuna can easily spot them, anchoveta gather in large groups called schools. This schooling behavior, where huge numbers of fish form a massive ball, evolved as a way to reduce the risk of being eaten. By sacrificing the unlucky fish on the outer edges, the school protects the majority.
The problem, from the anchoveta’s point of view, is that this behavior evolved long before humans and modern fishing gear came along. From a fishing boat, a school looks like a huge swarm of fish packed tightly near the surface. Large vessels can scoop up anchoveta in enormous quantities. When a boat finds a school, it circles the fish while releasing a long float line from the back. From this line, which can be up to 600 meters long, hangs a 50-meter net. Once the net surrounds the school, a cable at the bottom is pulled tight, closing the lower part like a drawstring bag and trapping the fish in a massive mesh sack. These boats have huge holds—some as big as 800 cubic meters, about the size of 12 40-foot shipping containers—and can bring millions of anchoveta back to port for processing.
Schooling also makes it hard for scientists to monitor fish populations, because anchoveta aren’t spread evenly across their habitat but clustered together in big balls. We might catch a lot, but that doesn’t mean there are many more out there.
Another concern, and not just for commercial fisheries, is that anchoveta are a vital link in the food web between plankton and larger animals. They eat plankton, and when their numbers grow, they provide food for many predator species higher up the chain, including humans. If anchoveta numbers crash, it could be disastrous for the entire ecosystem and those who rely on it. When this happened to the Black Sea anchovy in the late 20th century, phytoplankton populations surged, depleting oxygen in the water and threatening an already fragile marine ecosystem and the other fisheries that depended on it.
Anchoveta matter in all these economic and ecological ways, but they also highlight a broader problem in our extractive era: around the world, we are pushing species into such fragile conditions that we are no longer in control. Even if we slow or stop destroying habitats or harvesting, things are so precarious that natural environmental changes could push them over the edge.
Anchoveta have shown resilience to extreme environmental shifts, from severe El Niño events to intense overfishing in past decades, but the outlook is grim: research suggests that ocean warming and its effects will cause anchoveta numbers to drop by 8% to 14% per decade throughout the 21st century. As sea surface temperatures rise and salinity and oxygen levels change, the anchoveta’s range shifts, along with the stock’s fertility, spawning seasons, and how the population is distributed across different life stages—a key issue in fisheries, since it’s crucial to avoid catching fish too young to reproduce. All this is happening against the backdrop of ongoing global climate heating, with El Niño adding extra and growing pressures.
This year’s early closure of the anchoveta fishery before the quota was met surprised some in the industry, but it’s not the first time. JustLast year, Peru set its first fishing season quota at 3 million tonnes. But when scientists warned that the juvenile population—young fish not yet old enough to reproduce—was especially at risk, the government stopped the fleet early, with only 2.5 million tonnes caught. “The sustainable extraction of anchovy is a strategic priority for the country,” Jesús Barrientos, the vice minister of fisheries and aquaculture, said at the time.
The anchoveta catch limit is usually binding: the fleet generally catches its full allowance, or very close to it, by the time the season ends. Coming so close to the limit might seem like a bad thing, but it is seen as a sign of success. Much of what we know about fish populations comes from industry data on where, when, and how many fish are caught, and how old they are. However, illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing is estimated to make up as much as a fifth of the legal commercial catch worldwide. For this reason, the Peruvian government polices all commercial fisheries very tightly: in 2024 alone, it carried out 163,000 inspections and seized 1,000 tonnes of illegally caught anchoveta.
View image in fullscreen
Crates of anchoveta being unloaded from a fishing boat at the port of El Callao, Peru. Photograph: Rodrigo Abd/AP
If all these efforts work as planned, then when a fishery reaches its quota in a season, it means—at least in theory—that the industry is accurately reporting its operations, the stock assessment was more or less correct, and the regulators and inspectors are doing their jobs. The alternative—a quota that is never reached—might at first glance seem better, but it would be very bad news if the whole fleet was out there and couldn’t find enough fish to meet the allowance. This has happened before, most famously during what fisheries expert Dean Bavington calls the “managed annihilation” of Atlantic cod. For centuries, cod had made Newfoundland’s Grand Banks one of the most productive fisheries on the planet. By the time the fishery collapsed completely in the early 1990s, the absurdly high quota didn’t matter because the boats couldn’t find anywhere near enough fish to meet it. The oceans had been emptied; the cod were gone.
In contrast to Newfoundland, Peru’s fisheries managers decided to protect the anchoveta population, despite pressure from an industry that has a lot of influence with the government and is increasingly concentrated in the hands of massive corporations, both foreign and domestic. (In November 2024, the Canadian conglomerate Cooke Incorporated paid $1bn for Copeinca, the largest anchoveta firm in Peru. Cooke now controls a sixth of Peru’s anchoveta fishery and a fifth of its meal and oil processing.) Corporate power like that doesn’t take massive revenue losses lying down. When the government delayed the start of the fishing season in 2023, the CEO of an anchoveta conglomerate complained that regulators were “lost in a sea of ignorance,” creating an existential crisis for an industry that was “fighting to survive.” At that point, the ministry budged a little and temporarily reopened the fishery. This year, it held firm: “Sustainability takes precedence over any short-term decision,” Juan Carlos Requejo, the minister of production, said in mid-August.
The stakes are enormous. Peru’s fisheries sector contracted by almost 75% in June and July, and fishmeal production is plummeting just as prices have skyrocketed to almost $3,500 a tonne, more than twice what they were at the same time last year. The same is true of all the fisheries for high-value species that prey on anchoveta: the bonito, jack mackerel, and the rest of the bigger torpedo-shaped beauties that bring in premium prices.
The privatisation of the Peruvian anchoveta fishery began in 1992 and culminated in the introduction of a vessel quota system under the guidance of the World Bank in 2009. The creation of private property rights in the fishery has had complewith serious consequences, especially the growing marginalization and impoverishment of tens of thousands of small-scale fishers and their communities. Almost all the anchoveta catch is controlled by a group of wealthy boat owners and large companies with close ties to the government. Monitoring is constant, advanced, and data-driven. The goal is to run a sensitive, real-time regulatory system based on the idea that there is no longer any such thing as “normal” — and there isn’t. Every day of the anchoveta season, Peru’s ministry of production pays close attention to scientists’ advice and is ready to act, not only to end the season entirely but to make adjustments as needed, such as ordering temporary closures of local fishing zones. In August, the ministry declared a national fisheries and aquaculture emergency, which included launching a marine survey, Operation Eureka LXXVIII, to carry out an intensive stock assessment coordinated with the largest vessel owners. The outcome has not yet been officially announced, but in early October, Diario de Chimbote, the newspaper of Peru’s main fishing port (one of the largest in the world), reported that the second season of 2026 will be cancelled entirely: the water is too warm, forcing the anchoveta into deeper water and closer to shore, and the risks to juveniles are too great. Though this decision has not been confirmed, if it goes ahead, the closure is expected to cost Peru’s economy about $1.4bn. As Jessica Luna, president of Peru’s National Fisheries Society, an industry organization, put it, the sector is “in the ICU.” Before these most recent disasters, many industry observers have noted that by some measures, Peru’s management of fish populations is a remarkable success story, all the more impressive given the way multinational capital often gets what it wants in similar situations. In the past 20 years, the fluctuating catch numbers that plagued the industry for so long have declined considerably. But average harvests have also declined, and the trend is clearly downward. In the midst of what has been called a “Godzilla” El Niño, it is worth reconsidering what counts as success in a world in which crisis has become normal. Is the goal just a slightly slower road to the same destination? So far, despite everything, the anchoveta keep coming back, though in drastically diminished numbers compared with a few decades ago. It sometimes does seem as though they can survive whatever we throw at them, and their persistence can easily be mistaken for indestructibility. But there are limits to the resilience of any species or natural system. The fact that we don’t know where those limits are doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and as we push the anchoveta, and so much of the planet, we inevitably press upon fragilities we never knew were there, sometimes because until very recently they probably weren’t. Many of our leaders would have us believe that we can continue as before, but we have never been here before, and we need to proceed with modesty and care. Often, you only recognize a threshold once you have crossed it. Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs A Perfect Storm How the Super El Niño Is Destroying the Fishing Industry
1 What is a super El Niño
Its an unusually strong El Niño a climate pattern where warmerthannormal ocean water builds up in the central and eastern Pacific Super means the warming is extreme which makes its effects on weather and oceans much more severe
2 What does El Niño have to do with fishing
Fish follow their food and their food follows cold nutrientrich water El Niño warms that water and pushes nutrients deeper so fish either starve move away or swim too far for fishing boats to reach them
3 Why is this being called a perfect storm
Because several problems are hitting at once warmer oceans collapsing fish stocks stricter fishing limits higher fuel costs and shifting fish migration Any one alone is tough together theyre devastating
4 Which fish are hit the hardest
Coldwater species like anchovies sardines squid hake and salmon These depend on nutrientrich upwelling which El Niño shuts down
5 Why does warm water mean fewer fish
Warm water holds fewer nutrients and blocks the upwelling of cold foodrich water from the deep No nutrients means no plankton and plankton is the base of the entire ocean food chain
6 Where is the damage worst
Along the Pacific coast of South America especially Peru and Chile plus California Ecuador and parts of the western Pacific near Australia and Indonesia
7 How bad is it for Perus anchovy industry
Very bad Peru supplies a huge share of the worlds anchovies and past super El Niños cut catches by 5080 That ripples out to fishmeal animal feed and food prices worldwide
8 Is this just a natural cycle or is climate change involved
El Niño is natural but climate change is making ocean heat waves more frequent and intense stacking extra stress on top of an already bad situation
9 How does this affect fishermens livelihoods
Boats stay in port crews lose income and smallscale fishers who cant travel far to find fish are often hit first and hardest
10 Will fish just come back when El Niño ends
Usually yes but recovery can take years
