Sardines & Anchovies

Start with what a sardine is, because the answer explains why this market has no contract. A sardine is not a species. The Codex Alimentarius standard for canned sardines lists more than twenty different fish that may lawfully be sold in a tin marked sardine, and they are not close relatives. The list runs from the European pilchard through five Sardinops and six Sardinella, then keeps going into Atlantic herring, European sprat, Australian sandy sprat, round herring, and three anchovies including the Peruvian anchoveta. The word names a size of oily fish and a way of packing it, not an animal. That single fact is most of the tradability story here.

By tonnage, the European pilchard alone runs a bit over 1.2 million tonnes a year, and Morocco holds the largest single stock in the world, on the order of half the world catch of that species, landing roughly 525,000 tonnes in 2024. Add the Sardinops stocks of Japan, California, Peru, Chile, South Africa, and Australia, plus the Sardinella of West Africa and the Indian Ocean, and the small-pelagic complex is one of the largest wild harvests on earth. Small pelagic fish, meaning the small oily species that live in the open water column rather than on or near the seabed, are close to a third of world capture fisheries production, a share no farmed species approaches. The opposite of pelagic is demersal, the bottom-dwelling whitefish like cod and haddock, and that one distinction explains most of the differences between the seafood sheets on this site.

The second thing to know is that most of it is never eaten as a sardine. A large share of the catch goes straight into the reduction plants covered on the fishmeal sheet, to be cooked, pressed, and dried into feed protein for the salmon and shrimp on the neighbouring pages. The same boat can land into either channel depending on which pays that week, so the human-food price and the feed price are linked at the quayside. When Peru cancels an anchoveta season, the effect turns up later in a can of sardines.

What makes this market genuinely different from every other seafood sheet in this book is that it is storable. Salmon is flown chilled and eaten within two days. Tuna is auctioned at dawn. Shrimp and whitefish are frozen and stay frozen. A tin of sardines sits at room temperature for five years. That is a rare property in a food market, and in almost any other commodity it would be the precondition for a forward curve, because something you can hold is something you can carry, finance, and sell forward.

There is still no futures market anywhere, which is the interesting part. Storage is not the obstacle here, and neither is volume. What blocks a contract is that the tin is the product and the fish is an ingredient. A sardine cannot be graded to a contract specification, because the twenty-odd permitted species differ in size, oil content, and texture; because the pack matters as much as the fish (olive oil, sunflower oil, tomato, brine, skinless and boneless or whole); and because the value in the can is created after the fish is dead. That last point is visible on any supermarket shelf: a commodity tin sells for a dollar or two and a premium tin from the same seas sells for eight to twenty-five dollars. The fish did not change. So the fish is not what is being priced, and there is nothing there for a contract to settle against.

That premium tier is the fastest-growing part of the market, a genuine luxury trade hiding inside a product people think of as poverty food. The world tinned-fish market was around 15.4 billion dollars in 2025, growing about 5.6 percent a year, while the premium segment compounds at roughly 8 percent. Specialist retailers and the conservas bars of Lisbon, Porto, and Vigo now carry hundreds of separate references, and the Iberian and Breton houses have pushed the format about as far as it can go. The clearest example is the vintage-dated tin: at the Breton conserverie La Belle-Iloise a sardine de garde is held back in the cellar for a minimum of two years before sale, on the argument that the fish softens and the flavour marries in the oil the way a wine develops in bottle. Tins are dated by year, produced in limited series, collected, and laid down. Portugal sells sardines stamped with a birth year as gifts.

The same premium logic runs through the other canned fish, and tuna is where it goes furthest. The luxury tier there is ventresca, the belly cut of the albacore, hand-packed in olive oil, and a single tin of Spanish bonito del norte ventresca retails around twenty-four dollars against a supermarket can of skipjack light meat at a small fraction of it. Both are tuna. The difference is species, cut, pack, hand labour, and a brand, which is precisely the list of things a futures contract cannot standardise. The tuna sheet makes the same point from its own end, where the premium tin sits alongside the canning trade and the sashimi trade rather than inside either.

Supply, meanwhile, does something no farmed species does. It switches regime. Sardine and anchovy stocks in the same upwelling system alternate over decades, one abundant while the other is scarce, then trading places, and the driver is ocean temperature rather than fishing effort. The pattern shows up independently off California, Peru, Japan, and South Africa, and the shifts are large and prolonged enough that fisheries scientists describe whole periods as sardine regimes or anchovy regimes. It is currently visible from both ends: the Japanese sardine has been rebuilding since around 2010 with landings in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes, while the Pacific sardine off California sits near 30,000 tonnes of biomass with the fishery shut. Two stocks of closely related fish, an ocean apart, moving in opposite directions on a cycle set by water temperature rather than by anything the industry does.

The anchovy fish is a subset of the sardine fish category, and not only because Codex permits three of them in a sardine tin. Anchovy and sardine occupy the same ecological seat, they are the two sides of the regime shift just described, and commercially they could hardly be further apart. The Peruvian anchoveta is the largest single-species fishery on earth and almost none of it is eaten by a person: it goes to the reduction plants and becomes the fishmeal covered on the neighbouring Commodities 101 fishmeal sheet. The European anchovy is the mirror image of Peru, a far smaller catch that is almost entirely a food product, and at the top of it sits one of the most expensive fish products in the world by weight.

That top end is the salted Cantabrian anchovy, and the process explains the price. Fish are taken in a short spring season, roughly April to June, as they move inshore to spawn in the Bay of Biscay, then packed in sea salt in wooden barrels and cured for eight to twelve months, over which they lose half to sixty percent of their starting weight. Every fillet is then headed, gutted, boned, and trimmed by hand. A 50-gram tin starts around three euros at the entry level, and the better houses in Santona price by the individual fillet. So the same animal that is pumped out of a Peruvian hold by the thousand tonnes and dried into feed is, an ocean away, aged like ham and sold by the piece. There is no cleaner illustration in this book of a price made by processing rather than by the raw material.

The Bay of Biscay also supplies the sharpest picture of what a small-pelagic collapse looks like when the fish is worth real money. Catches fell from around 90,000 tonnes in the 1990s to under 10,000 tonnes by 2003, and by May 2005 the fleet had landed about one percent of a normal haul. The European Union closed the fishery outright in 2005 and kept it shut until spring 2010, five seasons with no anchovy at all, over which the pelagic fleet fell from 391 vessels to 239 and more than 2,500 families lost their income. It reopened in March 2010 on a 7,000 tonne quota, split eighty percent to Spain and the remainder to France, and the stock recovered. It is the counter-case to Monterey, California's sardine collapse, and the difference is that somebody shut the fishery in time.

None of that settles whether these fish should be caught at all, and that argument is now the central one in the fishery. Small pelagics are forage fish: the food of tuna, cod, salmon, mackerel, sharks, dolphins, humpback whales, penguins, puffins, and gannets. They occupy the narrow step in the food web where plankton becomes protein a predator can use, which is exactly what makes them so productive and so heavily fished. Take too many and the loss never appears in the catch statistics, because it shows up in animals nobody is fishing for. The Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force, thirteen scientists reporting in 2012, put numbers on it: the direct catch of forage fish was worth about 5.6 billion dollars a year against roughly 11.3 billion for the fisheries that depend on them, so the same fish were worth about twice as much left in the water as taken out of it, and the task force recommended halving the global forage catch.

The impact of sardine and anchovy fishing on seabird populations is also quite dramatic. A global study published in Science in December 2011 examined fourteen seabird species across seven ecosystems in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern Oceans and found the same breaking point in every one: chicks fledged per breeding pair begin to fall once prey biomass drops below about a third of its long-run maximum. The paper is titled One-Third for the Birds, and that fraction has become the informal reference for how much of a small-pelagic stock has to be left alone.

One last contrast carries into the rest of the seafood complex. Sardines are canned where they are landed, in Agadir and Safi, in Matosinhos and Vigo, in Douarnenez, because an oily fish begins to break down within hours and the cannery is the preservation step rather than a later stage of manufacture. That is the opposite of the round trip described on the salmon sheet, where fish caught in Alaska is frozen, shipped to Asia to be filleted, and shipped back. The rule that separates them is simple: when the processing has to happen fast it happens at the dock, and when it can wait it happens wherever labour is cheapest.