We now farm more fish than we catch
Increasingly, the contents of a seafood tower or “catch of the day” is more likely to have been farmed rather than caught in the wild.
That’s the latest conclusion from The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, an annual report published earlier this month by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which revealed that — for the first time in history — the majority of the world’s seafood came from fish farming rather than wild catching in 2022.
The practice of aquaculture — rearing fish and sea plants in controlled ponds, pens, and pools — produced more than 94 million metric tons of seafood in 2022 and is being hailed by some as a means of sustaining seafood production in the face of depleting wild fish stocks. The 2022 tally was double the production figure from 2006 and reflects decades of investment and innovation in the aquaculture industry, which 30 years ago accounted for just 15% of total seafood.
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Dataset
| million tonnes, live weight equivalent | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990s* | 2000s* | 2010s* | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | |
| Capture fisheries - Inland | 7.1 | 9.3 | 11.3 | 11.5 | 11.4 | 11.3 |
| Capture fisheries - Marine | 81.9 | 81.6 | 79.8 | 78.3 | 80.3 | 79.7 |
| Total capture fisheries | 88.9 | 90.9 | 91.1 | 89.8 | 91.6 | 91 |
| Aquaculture - Inland | 12.6 | 25.6 | 44.8 | 54.5 | 56.4 | 59.1 |
| Aquaculture - Marine | 9.2 | 17.9 | 26.7 | 33.2 | 34.7 | 35.3 |
| Total aquaculture | 21.8 | 43.4 | 71.5 | 87.7 | 91.1 | 94.4 |
| Total world fisheries and aquaculture | 110.7 | 134.3 | 162.6 | 177.5 | 182.8 | 185.4 |
| *Average per year |
Data sources
Note: Total aquaculture production, which includes algae and aquatic plants like seaweed, overtook wild fishing efforts more than a decade ago (the more recent milestone excludes sea plants).