The aquaculture sector is a net producer of proteins through its use of marine ingredients, mainly fishmeal and fish oil. It already plays and will continue to play a pivotal role in feeding a growing population. The role that the marine ingredients industry has in the economy and in communities should not be overlooked either. The COVID-19 pandemic offered a clear demonstration of the many positive initiatives created by the sector.
Not only nutritional benefits are multiplied: the ‘multiplier effect’ is a well-established economic concept which refers to value creation in terms of employment. The employment multiplier measures the amount of direct, indirect and induced jobs created (or lost) in a specific industry.
Seafish UK, the public body that represents the UK seafood industry, looked at other jobs that the fishing and seafood processing industry supports in a report entitled ‘The economic impacts of the UK sea fishing and fish processing sectors: An input-output analysis’1. It is estimated that one employee in the pelagic catching sector supports 5.6 jobs in the wider UK economy and one employee in the pelagic processing sector supports 5.9 jobs in wider UK economy.
“When you consider that the pelagic fleet employs around 300 fishermen, and pelagic processing sector about 2,000 employees, then the figures really begin to stack-up”, Ian Gatt, Chairman of the Scottish Pelagic Sustainability Group, explains in an interview with The Scottsman, referring to mackerel and herring as premium products requiring sophisticated technologies that need maintenance and servicing.
Official statistics to be found in the FAO’s The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (2020), indicate that 59.5 million people were engaged (on a full-time, part-time or occasional basis) in the primary sector of capture fisheries and aquaculture in 2018 – “20.5 million people in aquaculture and 39.0 million in fisheries, a slight increase from 2016”.
Read more, HERE.
The Aquaculturists
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