When the Anchoveta Vanished: The 1972-73 Collapse That Shook World Markets

In 1970, the greatest fishery the world had ever seen was operating off the desert coast of Peru. Fleets of purse seiners worked the cold, green waters of the Humboldt Current, hauling in a small silver fish — the Peruvian anchoveta — in quantities without precedent in the history of fishing. That year the catch reached roughly 12.3 million tonnes: about one-fifth of all the fish caught on Earth, from a single species, in the waters of a single country.

Two years later, the fish were gone.

The richest fishery in history

The anchoveta boom was astonishingly fast. From essentially nothing in the early 1950s, Peru built the largest single-species fishery in history in under two decades. The engine was the Humboldt Current upwelling: winds along the Peruvian coast drag deep, cold, nutrient-rich water to the surface, fueling plankton blooms that support anchoveta in almost unimaginable densities.

Very little of the catch was eaten by people. The anchoveta were rendered into fishmeal — protein-rich feed for chickens, pigs and farmed animals across North America, Europe and Japan. By the early 1970s, world livestock production had quietly grown dependent on the productivity of one current off one coast.

Scientists had warned that catch levels were unsustainable. But the boom had its own momentum — until the ocean itself intervened.

El Niño meets overfishing

In 1972, a strong El Niño developed in the tropical Pacific, eventually peaking at an Oceanic Niño Index of about +2.1. Off Peru, its signature was the one Paita's fishermen had known for centuries: warm water flooding south, displacing the cold upwelling. The nutrient supply collapsed, the plankton failed, and the anchoveta — those that survived — retreated to scattered cold pockets, where the fleet, tragically, could still find and catch them.

The numbers tell the story with brutal economy. Harvests fell about 55 percent in 1972, then another 51 percent in 1973, bottoming out around 1.5-2 million tonnes. A fishery of twelve million tonnes had shrunk to a rump in twenty-four months.

Crucially, El Niño did not act alone. Years of severe overfishing had stripped the stock of the resilience that might have carried it through a warm event, as earlier generations of anchoveta had survived earlier El Niños. Warm water provided the shock; overexploitation ensured there was no cushion. The stock did not recover for over a decade.

The economic wreckage in Peru was severe — idle fleets, shuttered fishmeal plants, a coastal economy built on anchoveta suddenly without its foundation. In 1973, the Peruvian government nationalized the industry, creating the state enterprise Pesca Perú to manage what remained.

The shock goes global

What made 1972-73 a landmark in El Niño history was not only what happened in Peru but what happened everywhere else. With Peruvian fishmeal abruptly scarce, feed buyers around the world scrambled for substitutes — above all, soybeans. Soybean and animal-feed prices soared. The cost of producing chicken and pork rose on continents that had never heard of the Humboldt Current.

Nor was the fishery collapse the event's only global signature. The same 1972-73 El Niño coincided with drought in India, the Sahel, Australia and Central America — a synchronized failure of harvests that, together with the feed-price shock, helped trigger the 1972-74 world food crisis.

For the first time, economists, governments and commodity traders could watch a Pacific climate event propagate through global markets in real time. El Niño was no longer a Peruvian curiosity or a scientific abstraction; it was a force capable of moving world prices. That realization would build steadily toward the great research investments of the 1980s, described in our history of TOGA and the birth of forecasting.

Lessons from a small fish

The anchoveta collapse became a foundational case study in fisheries science: the textbook demonstration that climate variability and overfishing interact, and that a stock hammered by both can fall off a cliff that neither force alone would have produced. It reshaped how scientists think about managing fisheries in ENSO-exposed ecosystems, where the sustainable catch in a warm year is radically lower than in a cold one.

It also marked a turning point in how humanity perceived El Niño. The events chronicled elsewhere in the full event timeline — 1982-83, 1997-98, 2015-16 — would each be measured partly in economic terms, in billions of dollars of losses tracked across dozens of countries. That accounting tradition began in 1972, with empty nets off Peru and soybean prices climbing on the Chicago exchanges: the moment the world learned that when the Pacific warms, everyone pays.