5 minBusiness
Sardine supplies shrink nearly half as climate change and Iran war squeeze global market
Morocco's sardine landings fell nearly 46% between 2022 and 2024 as warming waters push fish farther from shore and the Iran war drives up fuel costs, threatening a booming tinned fish market.
America's growing appetite for tinned sardines is colliding with a shrinking supply as climate change and the war in Iran combine to cut Morocco's fish landings by nearly half. Morocco, the world's top sardine supplier, saw its catch fall roughly 46% between 2022 and 2024, according to industry data, and the pressures behind that decline are compounding in ways that are pushing up prices for consumers worldwide.
Sardines are unusually sensitive to water temperature, and warming oceans are driving the fish into new territories farther from traditional fishing grounds. At the same time, the war in Iran and the effective shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz — through which about one-fifth of the world's oil supply normally passes — have driven up fuel costs. Fishermen now must travel longer distances to find the fish, just as it costs them more to get there, and they are bringing back far smaller catches.
Rashid Sumaila, a professor and Canada Research Chair in interdisciplinary ocean and fisheries economics at the University of British Columbia, said the combination of pressures is unlike anything he has seen affect the industry before. He noted that sardines follow temperature shifts, moving from Mexico through U.S. waters and into Canada when conditions warm, and that Morocco's sardines are shifting in the same way.
«Some of that 45% drop is partly climate change, and partly overfishing, and other things happening to the ocean,» Sumaila said. «You have pollution, plastic. Stresses upon stresses.»
The Iran war adds a second layer of pressure, even though Iran's own waters are not a major sardine source. The conflict has driven up energy prices globally, and since the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to shipping this spring, Brent crude surged 10% to 13% in what the International Energy Agency called the largest oil-supply disruption in market history. Sumaila said fishermen thousands of miles from the Persian Gulf are feeling the impact.
«Thai fishers are feeling it,» he said. «You can imagine Moroccan fishers, or fishers in Africa or the Pacific Islands, feeling it too.»
The two pressures interact in a specific way for Moroccan boats, Sumaila explained, because they 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.
«It's more risky,» he said. «Insurance payments, security for people. The combination is really quite scary.»
The same pressures are reshaping how Morocco sells what it does catch. Frozen sardine exports have fallen from about 70% of the country's small open-sea fish exports in 2020 to roughly 23% in 2025, even before the war began. Sumaila noted that freezing requires energy, and energy prices are rising while sources are being reduced.
Consumers will feel the impact at the grocery store, Sumaila said, pointing to his research on Canadian household spending on seafood. «This isn't only the fish we catch in Canada,» he said. «It's fish coming from all over the world. All of it gets affected. The price dynamics show up in people's household budgets.»
The affordability pressure is not limited to lower-income countries, he added. «It's not only in the developing world. We all feel it. I don't go to any meeting these days where somebody isn't talking about the cost of groceries.»
Government fuel subsidies are making the underlying problem worse, Sumaila said. While public spending on fish stock research and fisheries management is useful, paying for fuel encourages overfishing. His team's most recently published estimate puts global fisheries subsidies at $35.4 billion in 2018, with $22.2 billion classified as capacity-enhancing subsidies that fuel overfishing, shrinking fish populations further and forcing boats to travel even farther for a diminishing catch.
The supply crunch comes as demand for tinned fish reaches record levels. U.S. sales of shelf-stable seafood climbed from $2.3 billion in 2018 to more than $2.7 billion in 2024, and Americans bought $3.52 billion worth over the past year. Sardines have overtaken salmon as the second-most popular tinned fish behind tuna, and the global tinned fish market, worth roughly $10.24 billion in 2024, is projected to reach $17.97 billion by 2034.
