The Morocco sardine supply crisis is squeezing one of America’s fastest-growing food habits, with the country’s fish landings crashing nearly 46% between 2022 and 2024 to just 525,000 metric tons, according to Reuters.
Morocco is the world’s top sardine supplier. The collapse in its catch comes as sardines overtook salmon to become the second-most popular tinned fish in the United States, behind tuna.
Two forces are driving the shortfall: warming seas are pushing sardines further from shore, and the war in Iran is pushing up fuel costs for the boats that must chase them.
Morocco sardine supply crisis: what is behind the numbers
Rashid Sumaila, a professor and Canada Research Chair in interdisciplinary ocean and fisheries economics at the University of British Columbia, said sardines are unusually sensitive to temperature change.
‘When it’s warm, sardines move from Mexico through the US, and Canadians see more sardines,’ Sumaila told Fortune. ‘They follow the temperature.’
Morocco’s sardines are shifting in the same way. As the fish move toward cooler, deeper water further from port, fishermen must spend more time and fuel to reach them.
Pelagic species such as sardines account for around 80% of Morocco’s coastal fish resources, compared with 20% for white fish, Reuters reported. That concentration means the wider Moroccan fishing industry has little to fall back on when sardine stocks move.
The fuel problem compounds the distance problem. Since fighting in Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping this spring, Brent crude surged 10% to 13%. The International Energy Agency described the event as the largest oil-supply disruption in the market’s history.
Sumaila said fishermen far from the Persian Gulf are feeling it. ‘Thai fishers are feeling it,’ he said. ‘You can imagine Moroccan fishers, or fishers in Africa or the Pacific Islands, feeling it too.’
‘It’s more risky,’ he added. ‘Insurance payments, security for people. The combination is really quite scary. It’s like we’re facing a double whammy.’
Shrinking exports and rising prices
The Morocco sardine supply crisis is already reshaping global trade flows. 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 Iran war added fresh pressure on energy costs.
Morocco has responded with a ban on frozen sardine exports, intended to protect domestic supply and stabilise prices at home. Sumaila was sceptical. ‘When you ban fish, maybe in the short term you have some relief,’ he said. ‘But that triggers a lot of other things you might not even perceive when you do it.’
Elsewhere in Europe, quotas are tightening. Portugal’s 2026 sardine season reopened in May with a national catch limit of 33,446 tonnes, nearly 1,000 tonnes fewer than the year before. Spain’s 2026 quota came in nearly 3% lower than the prior year, yet sardines there still fetched an average of 1.50 euros a kilogram, 50 cents above 2024 levels.
Higher prices are filtering through to household budgets worldwide. Sumaila’s research into Canadian consumers’ grocery spending on seafood found affordability pressure is not limited to lower-income countries. ‘I don’t go to any meeting these days where somebody isn’t talking about the cost of groceries,’ he said.
Government fuel subsidies are making the structural problem worse, Sumaila argued. His team’s most recently published estimate puts global fisheries subsidies at $35.4 billion in 2018, with $22.2 billion of that classified as capacity-enhancing subsidies that drive overfishing. ‘If you pay for fuel, that just makes people fish more than they would,’ he said.
Portugal’s 2026 sardine season is already under way under its reduced quota, giving markets their next clear signal of whether the tighter limits will steady prices or accelerate them further.
