FUTURE

New aquaculture projects must learn from the failure of past ventures

By Alejandro Guelfo, misPeces’ editor, 5 January 2026

Proyectos financieros - riesgos

The beginning of the year represents for many a new cycle and the launch of ideas, projects and expectations. In the aquaculture sector in which we operate, as in any complex industrial sector, business failure is often interpreted as irrefutable proof that something “did not work”.

Many confuse the part with the whole, and the failure of a business project with the failure of a production model or even of the sector itself. This interpretation, while understandable, is complete: innovation in aquaculture advances, to a large extent, through failed attempts.

At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, a number of dramatic business failures were documented, some of them fairly predictable. Many involved more robust, better structured and more realistic.

Aquaculture is not like launching a rocket into space; it may be even more challenging, as it is not simply a matter of having the best materials, the most advanced technology or engineering capable of producing accurate calculations. The aquaculture sector operates with a delicate balance between biology, engineering, economics and regulation. It only takes one of these elements to be underestimated for the entire system to become unstable.

The idea may be sound, and yet the project may fail. This happens when biological complexity is underestimated, when pilot results are assumed to be scalable without friction, or when economic models are built on “textbook” performance that does not withstand real-world conditions. Unexpected mortality, variability in growth, health issues or operational failures tend to appear with a delay, at a point when room for manoeuvre is already minimal.

In aquaculture, haste is rarely a good adviser. This is particularly true when available capital is tight and results do not meet expectations. Under these conditions, projects often drift towards progressive financial exhaustion, where any incident can quickly become a terminal event.

Paradoxically, many of these failures are explained less by technology itself than by the economic model surrounding it. Overly optimistic sales prices, underestimated energy costs, excessive dependence on external financing or subsidies, and a clear disconnect from the real market are common factors. In aquaculture, having an interesting solution is not the same as solving a priority problem for the producer, and when the customer does not perceive clear value – or cannot accommodate the operational changes required – the project loses traction.

Failure also plays a cleansing role. It recalibrates inflated expectations, removes models based more on promises than on engineering, and brings the focus back to operational robustness. Many innovations were never meant to be mass solutions or global products, but rather useful tools for specific niches, particular stages of the production cycle or as functional complements. When a company fails by trying to be “too big, too soon”, the sector learns where that innovation does – and does not- make sense.

The real risk, therefore, is not that some companies fail, but that the sector interprets those failures as a signal to stop trying. Aquaculture faces structural challenges – dependence on finite resources, regulatory pressure, cost volatility and environmental demands – that do not disappear by being ignored. Choosing not to explore alternatives because early interactions are not yet profitable does not eliminate risk; it merely shifts it to the future, when the margin for adaptation will be narrower.