An Overview of Fisheries and Aquaculture in India

Abstract

Fisheries play an important role in the world economy and food for million. All over the world, more than 30 million fishers and fish farmers and their families gain their livelihoods from fisheries. Globally, fish provide about 16 per cent of the animal protein consumed by humans, and are a valuable source of minerals and essential fatty acids. Although, wild fishery resources are in practice finite for production purposes. If they are overexploited, production declines and may even collapse. What made possible the continuing rise in overall fish production is the rapid growth of aquaculture. Global fish production has grown steadily in the last five decades with food fish supply increasing at an average annual rate of 3.2 per cent, outpacing world population growth at 1.6 per cent. Capture fisheries and aquaculture supplied the world with about 158.0 million tonnes of fish in 2012 of which 91.3 million tonnes was from capture fishery and 66.6 million tonnes from aquaculture. In the same year, total production of India was 8.66 million tonnes which included 3.372 million tonnes from capture fishery and 5.294 million tonnes from aquaculture and noticed increase at an annual rate of 5.2 percent in compare to population growth rate at 1.3%. India's export earnings increased rapidly and almost doubled within 6 years i.e. 8363.52 crores in 2006–07 to 16597.23 crores in 2011–12. In this study, statistical analysis of fish production was done against the world to estimate its growth in compare to world.