El Niño Jolts Peru's Fisheries: Anchoveta Catch Plunges 99% as Jumbo Squid Gains Ground Amid Expert Monitoring

PERU-CLIMATE-FISHING-ANCHOVY — Anchovies (Engraulis ringens) are being captured with a fishing net during a fishing task aboard an anchovy boat out to sea after 5 miles in the department of Lima on November 19, 2023. El Niño, the climatic phenomenon that periodically raises ocean temperatures, causing droughts and floods, is wreaking havoc in Peru, the world's leading producer of fish oil and fishmeal made from anchoveta, a variety of fish up to 20 centimeters long that lives in the moderately cold waters off the Peruvian and Chilean coasts. Photo by Ernesto BENAVIDES / AFP via Getty Images

The Briefing:

Peru's July 2026 anchovy landings totaled just 2,496 metric tons — down 99.1% from the 292,148 tons registered in July 2025, marking the most severe single-month collapse in the country's dominant fishery in recent decades.
Peru's central bank now projects a 30.7% contraction for the fishing sector in 2026 and has trimmed the country's GDP growth forecast from 3.4% to 3.2% as a direct consequence of El Niño's escalating intensity.
Fishmeal exports could fall 40% to 70% this year, according to the Idexcam trade institute; approximately 78,000 fishing jobs face elimination in 2026 alone, with another 44,000 threatened in 2027.

Only 2,496 metric tons of anchovy reached Peru's docks in July 2026 — a 99.1% free fall from the 292,148 tons unloaded in the same month a year earlier, according to national production statistics from INEI. El Niño has effectively shut down the fishery that makes Peru the world's leading anchovy-producing nation.

That near-complete erasure is now cascading through fishmeal markets, coastal employment, and export revenues — and driving regulators to rely far more heavily on the giant squid as the sector's emergency buffer species.

A Season Predicted to Struggle Before It Began

The warning signals arrived well before a single vessel left port. In April, Peru authorized the start of its 2026 North-Central anchovy season with a total allowable catch of 1,914,049 metric tons — the lowest ceiling in a decade, already discounted against early El Niño warnings from government climate monitors. By May, abnormally warm surface waters forced fishing authorities to suspend operations, and anchovy landings earmarked for fishmeal production collapsed 97.6% year-on-year, from 1,327,933 tons recorded in May 2025 to just 31,771 tons.

June offered no relief. National statistics agency INEI confirmed only 629 tons of anchovy were unloaded across the entire country that month — compared with 462,302 tons in June 2025, a 99.9% year-over-year drop — as authorities kept the precautionary ban active. By the time Peru formally ended the North-Central season on August 21, cumulative landings had reached only around 471,000 tons — roughly one quarter of an already-reduced quota and a fraction of the 2.3 million tons delivered at the same calendar point in 2025. July's near-zero data confirmed what industry observers had feared: the season was functionally over weeks before officials made the closure official.

What the Collapse Means for Peru's Economy

In its September 2026 inflation report, the Banco Central de Reserva del Perú cut its full-year fishing forecast to a 30.7% sector contraction — a steeper drop than its June estimate — attributing the revision to El Niño's worsening force and its classification by authorities as an extraordinary-intensity event. The same report reduced Peru's national GDP growth projection from 3.4% to 3.2%. IFFO, the global marine ingredients organization, has stated that El Niño conditions are continuing to strengthen and are forecast to persist into early 2027.

Processing industries directly dependent on the catch are absorbing a parallel blow. Primary manufacturing — built around converting anchovy into fishmeal and fish oil — is tracking toward a 7.1% contraction in 2026. Idexcam, the trade research unit of Lima's Chamber of Commerce, has forecast that fishmeal shipments could decline between 40% and 70% this year, while fish oil faces an even sharper reduction, since warmer water depletes the fat content of the anchovies that do get landed. Because Peru ordinarily accounts for roughly 20% of total global fishmeal output, the shortfall is already tightening supply chains for aquaculture operations from Norway to coastal China.

Tens of Thousands of Jobs in the Balance

The human cost is mounting steadily at the ports. Analysts at the Chamber of Commerce of Lima have calculated that fishing's share of national output would slide from 2.1% to roughly 1% of GDP under current conditions. Research from Apoyo Consultoría, commissioned by Peru's National Fisheries Society, projects that approximately 78,000 fishing-sector positions are at risk of disappearing in 2026 alone, with an additional 44,000 threatened the following year — a combined exposure of roughly 122,000 livelihoods that represents nearly half the sector's total direct and indirect workforce. In artisanal communities stretching from Piura in the country's north to Chimbote in the Ancash region, the scarcity is already driving retail fish prices higher and cutting household income for fleets that depend on daily catch volumes.

Giant Squid Steps In — Under Careful Management

With anchovy operations largely paralyzed, Peru has pivoted aggressively toward its second-most-important commercial species: the giant squid, called pota in local markets. On August 30, the Ministry of Production expanded the 2026 pota quota to 709,659 tons through Resolution RM 00304-2026-PRODUCE, acting on biological survey data gathered by IMARPE during its Operación Calamar Gigante V mission. The quota increase unlocked 82,321 additional tons of extraction rights available through December 31, distributed across vessel-capacity categories to prevent fishing pressure from concentrating in any single coastal zone.

Regulators then went a step further. On October 3, PRODUCE authorized IMARPE to conduct the season's first exploratory pota fishing mission, running through October 31, under an adaptive management framework built specifically for the 2026-2027 El Niño window. The campaign's primary objective is to track the squid's distribution patterns and biological condition as ocean temperatures remain elevated — data that will determine whether additional exploratory surveys will be authorized before year-end.

A Buffer Species, Not a Full Substitute

Fisheries scientists are careful to limit expectations for what the squid can compensate for. Pota and other non-traditional species are already showing distributional and behavioral shifts linked to altered ocean conditions, and a prolonged warming event could push populations into zones harder for Peru's artisanal fleet to reach. The November-to-January second anchovy season sits directly in the path of an event that Peru's National Fisheries Society has compared in potential severity to the catastrophic 1997-1998 El Niño. IMARPE's October survey results will give the industry its clearest near-term reading on whether conditions are stabilizing — or whether Peru's most consequential fishing crisis in a generation still has further to go.