The smell of money: why locals think Peru’s billion-dollar fishmeal sector stinks

Foul-smelling sludge from the seabed of a bay in Chimbote, Peru. ‘There is virtually no oxygen in this mud, you can see there’s no life,’ says Prof Romulo Loayza. Photograph: Dan Collyns/The Guardian

Just before you reach Chimbote, a seaside city 260 miles (420km) north of the Peruvian capital Lima, you can smell it. It’s like the whiff of a fishmonger’s stall on a hot afternoon. For Peruvians, it’s synonymous with a bad pong; “smells like Chimbote” means something stinks.

Once that scent was “the smell of money”, according to another popular expression. A natural superabundance of Peruvian anchovy – known locally as anchoveta – off its Pacific coast makes Peru the world’s biggest producer of fishmeal, a condensed powder or cake made from ground dried fish.