Blue injustice: competing claims for freshwater forage fisheries

This paper draws on blue justice scholarship to examine how inequalities are intensified as small forage fish move between “fish as food” and “fish as feed,” highlighting distributional justice as a key lens for understanding pressures on fisheries-based households. Forage fish, which can be consumed in diverse forms or diverted into aquafeed (including direct feed and fishmeal), are contested resources among artisanal fishers, fish processors, and small producer fish farmers in Cambodia’s Tonlé Sap region. We show how declining forage fish populations—driven by overfishing, environmental change, and aquaculture’s demand for feed—reshape livelihoods, including women’s post-harvest work, and exacerbate social inequities by redirecting an important food source away from low-income populations.