To fully comprehend global aquaculture production the significance of seaweeds, and the role of extractive species, should not be sidelined

by Dr Thierry Chopin

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) recently published The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, its biennial document, which contains a wealth of information on both fisheries and aquaculture throughout the world.
 

While FAO should be commended for giving more and more attention to seaweed aquaculture production, it continues to treat the seaweed aquaculture sector as a different category, with separate tables and separate comments in different sections. This could lead to a distorted view of what really constitutes the total world aquaculture.

For that reason, we thought to revisit the statistical information provided by FAO, by integrating data regarding the seaweed aquaculture sector together with the data of the other sectors of the world aquaculture production (mostly fish, molluscs and crustaceans), to demonstrate how a combined analysis can modify the conclusions reached.

Distribution between world fisheries and aquaculture production
In its Table 1, FAO reported total capture fisheries landings as 96.4 million tonnes (expressed on a “live weight” basis, as all other numbers here after) and total aquaculture production as 82.1 million tonnes, in 2018. However, a footnote at the bottom of the table states that this table “excludes aquatic mammals, crocodiles, alligators and caimans, seaweeds and other aquatic plants”. Clearly, this footnote can easily be overlooked by readers, and, consequently, the conclusion that can be reached is that capture fisheries represent 54.0 percent and aquaculture represents 46.0 percent of the total world fisheries landings and aquaculture production (178.5 million tonnes).

If the worldwide production of aquatic mammals, crocodiles, alligators and caimans is relatively small and poorly documented in data, that of seaweeds is significantly large and should not be ignored (32.4 million tonnes, valued at US $13.3 billion). In marked contrast, the harvesting of wild seaweeds represented only 2.9 percent of the total global reported seaweed production or 0.9 million tonnes in 2018. Consequently, including these data, capture fisheries (97.3 million tonnes) represent 45.9 percent, and aquaculture (114.5 million tonnes) now represents 54.1 percent of the total world fisheries landings and aquaculture production (211.8 million tonnes) in 2018.

Consequently, the “farming more than catch” milestone was definitely reached by 2018, if the seaweed sector were to be considered in the total statistics. Seaweeds were the first group of organisms to reach the “farming more than catch” milestone in 1971. Since then, farmed freshwater fish production reached this milestone in 1986, farmed mollusc production in 1994, farmed diadromous fish production in 1997 and farmed crustacean production in 2010. However, according to the FAO, the production of farmed marine fish is not expected to overtake marine capture production in the near future.

Read more, HERE.

The Aquaculturists

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