(2019) took an analytical and econometric look at potential mariculture production and concluded that the ocean could produce six times more than what it does currently, providing almost two-thirds of the total protein demand of the world population. (2017) projected that global offshore aquaculture production could grow by more than 100 times the current production of finfish, concluding that “the current total landings of all wild-capture fisheries could be produced using less than 0.015% of the global ocean area”. Gentry et al., 2017 Lester et al., 2018 Oyinlola et al., 2018 Costello & Connor, 2019) have modelled potential production and suggest possibilities for aquaculture expansion based on suitable fish farming areas. It is worth noting that FAO farmed production quantities include farmed algae and oyster-shells” ( Edwards et al., 2019). This impressive growth may have generated what we denote here as aquaculture over-optimism, i.e., the belief that aquaculture can continue to grow at its recent rate or even faster, and therefore be able to meet global demand for fish single-handedly.ĭata provided by the FAO show that aquaculture production has been growing much faster than global wild catch since the 1980s ( Figure 1A) ( FAO, 2018), with the FAO (2022) drawing attention to “another all-time record of 122.6 million tonnes of farmed fish production in live weight in 2020”. Finally, the current geographical distribution of farmed fish production suggests that even if aquaculture over-optimism is physically, economically, technically and ecologically feasible, its socio-economic cost to low-income coastal countries could be devastating.Īquaculture is currently lauded as one of the fastest-growing food systems in the world ( Klinger & Naylor, 2012 Troell et al., 2014), growing from a few million tonnes in 1950 to over 90 million tonnes per year more recently ( FAO, 2018 FAO, 2020a FAO, 2022). Also, our results indicate that without wild fish, the world will face a fish food shortage of about 71 million tonnes annually by 2030, and the aquaculture production growth rate would have to be 3 times current average projected production by the FAO, the World Bank and the OECD in 2030. We show relevant evidence suggesting that aquaculture growth rates in all the cases studied have already reached their peak and have begun declining. Here we investigate whether the recent growth in aquaculture production can be maintained, and we compare aquaculture production projections with the future need for fish to find out whether aquaculture over-optimism can be justified. An extreme form of this is the notion that we need not worry about sustaining wild fish stocks because we can meet the global need through farming. The recent rapid growth in aquaculture production reported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization may have inadvertently generated what we denote here as aquaculture over-optimism.
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