Abstract
To ensure food security and nutritional quality for a growing world population in the face of climate change, stagnant capture fisheries production, increasing aquaculture production and competition for natural resources, countries must be accountable for what they consume rather than what they produce. To investigate the sustainability of seafood consumption, we propose a methodology to examine the impact of seafood supply chains across national boundaries: the seafood consumption footprint. The seafood consumption footprint is expressed as the biomass of domestic and imported seafood production required to satisfy national seafood consumption, and is estimated using a multi-regional input output model. Thus, we reconstruct for the first time the global fish biomass flows in national supply chains to estimate consumption footprints at the global, country and sector levels (capture fisheries, aquaculture, distribution and processing, and reduction into fishmeal and fish oil) taking into account the biomass supply from beyond national borders.
Highlights
Over the past 50 years, annual global consumption of seafood1 products per capita has more than doubled, from almost 10 kg in 1960 to over 20 kg in 2014 (FAO 2016b).Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Seafood protein represents an essential nutritional component in many countries, especially where total protein intake levels are low
Global capture fisheries and aquaculture primary production sectors deliver 67.1 million tonnes and 60.6 million tonnes respectively to the seafood distribution and processing industries which, in turn, contribute to a global demand for seafood destined for human consumption of 143.8 million tonnes
17.6% of global aquaculture production, 27.5% of the production from the seafood distribution and processing industries and 68.6% of the fishmeal and fish oil production are traded internationally. These results confirm the importance of international trade in seafood products; the trade in fishmeal and oil and the relatively high trade in production from capture fisheries compared to aquaculture
Summary
According to the UN, today’s world population of more than 7 billion will rise to approximately 9 billion by 2030 and to 10 billion by 2050 (Gerland et al 2014) Such rapid population growth will give rise to a rapid increase in the global demand for additional food Global landings from capture fisheries increased to reach more than 90 million tonnes in 1994 and stabilized thereafter; while global aquaculture production more than doubled during the 1990 s with an annual growth of 10 %, falling to 6 % over the period 2000–2014 (FAO 2016a)
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