What on earth happened to the price of mackerel?

I went to do the online shop the other day and nearly fell off my chair. Tesco’s own-brand tinned mackerel has jumped to £1.30. That is a massive hike from the recent jump to £1. Smoked mackerel went from £3 to over a fiver.

Like me, you are probably staring at the screen wondering wtf happened.

Most people will assume this is standard greedflation. They are wrong. This is a colossal fuck up 15 years in the making. We are watching a food source collapse because five different governments decided to play chicken with the ocean.

Here is the chain of events that turned a 60p tin of fish into a luxury item.

Global pollution was the trigger: As the planet heated up, the North East Atlantic got too warm. The mackerel did what any sensible animal would do. They migrated North and West into colder Icelandic and Faroese waters to survive. This broke the old fishing agreements because the fish physically moved territories.

Human greed was the response: When the fish moved, the "Coastal States" (UK, EU, Norway, Iceland, Faroe Islands) started a diplomatic war. Iceland and the Faroes said the fish were in their waters, so they were catching them. The UK and EU claimed historic rights, so they were catching them too. Instead of cutting a deal, they tried to eat the same pie twice. Every nation prioritised grabbing cash now over the species surviving later.

Government incompetence sealed the deal: This is the damning part. For 15 years, scientists (ICES) handed these governments a piece of paper every single year. It warned that if they caught more than a specific amount, the stock would crash. Every year, ministers from the UK and Europe looked at that paper, ignored it, and legislated catch limits 30-40% higher than the safe limit. The "accidentally" overfish had became the law.

The crash is happening now: We have arrived at the inevitable conclusion. The stock has collapsed. On 30 September 2025, the scientists released their advice for next year. It is apocalyptic. That price hike in Tesco is the sound of a resource physically vanishing from the planet.

If that wasn't enough to make your blood boil, here are four other reasons why you’re paying through the nose.

The salmon tax: A huge chunk of the mackerel catch doesn’t even end up on the shelves. It gets ground up into fishmeal to feed farmed salmon. We fished the ocean dry of wild, healthy, cheap protein to feed it to expensive, fatty, farmed fish. We cannibalised the poor man’s food to subsidise the rich man’s dinner. It is stupidity on an industrial scale. Farmed salmons is one of the biggest "eco" scam in the last decade.

The invisible slaughter: The official numbers are a joke thanks to a practice called "slippage". When industrial trawlers catch a shoal that is too big or contains fish that are too small, they often release the net underwater. It sounds humane, but it is actually brutal. The stress and injury kill up to 80% of those fish. Millions of dead mackerel sink to the bottom and never get counted in the quota.

The Russian backdoor: While the UK and EU were imposing sanctions on Moscow, the Faroe Islands kept a side door open. They allowed Russian trawlers to fish in their shared zone. This effectively let the Russian fleet bypass Western conservation efforts and vacuum up fish in the very migration path we were trying to manage. We had a hole in the bucket that the Faroese government refused to plug.

The supermarket lie: Don’t let the supermarkets play the victim. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) stripped the "sustainable" blue tick from North East Atlantic mackerel way back in 2019. Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and the rest knew for six years that this fish was being hunted unsustainably. They kept selling it anyway. They just took the blue sticker off the packaging and kept taking your money until the supply ran dry.

Next year is the cliff edge:

If you think £1.30 a tin is bad, you need to brace yourself. We are currently staring down the barrel of a supply collapse that makes the 2025 price hikes look like a warm-up act.

I am already seeing the panic set in. The sardine shelves are emptying out fast. People are desperate for an affordable protein source and are stripping the aisles of the "easy" options like sardines in sunflower oil or tomato. The dominoes are falling. When the mackerel goes, the pressure shifts to the next species. The price of everything goes up.

The scientific advice released in September 2025 recommends a 77% cut in catches for 2026. They want the total catch slashed from around 755,000 tonnes to just 174,000 tonnes. That is a three-quarter deletion of the supply. If the governments actually listen to this advice, mackerel will be a rare commodity. We are talking £2.00+ per tin. Easily.

A special "fuck you" to the Faroe Islands:

The UK and EU will likely make some noise about sustainability and cut their quotas because Tesco and M&S are terrified of the bad PR. Do not expect the Faroe Islands to play ball.

Despite global sanctions, the Faroese government renewed their fishing deal with Russia for 2025. They have consistently prioritised short-term greed and Russian rubles over the health of the ocean. They are the ones holding the vacuum cleaner while the rest of us pay the bill.