Seafood in Food Security: A Call for Bridging the Terrestrial-Aquatic Divide

Stacia Stetkiewicz,Richard Newton,Gill Banner-Stevens,Angus Garrett,Margaret Crumlish,Birgitte Krogh-Poulsen,Neil L Andrew,Faruk U Islam,Michael F Tlusty,Tori Spence-Mcconnell,Simon R Bush,Gulshan Ara,Alexandra Pounds,David C Little,Wenbo Zhang,Andrea Schapper,Peter Edwards,Alexander M Kaminski,Mahmoud Eltholth,James A Young,Nanna Roos,Marian Kjellevold,Ben Belton,Lynne Falconer,Jessica R Bogard,Raffaele Vignola,Iain Gatward,William Leschen,Froukje Kruijssen,Pete Coffee,Elin Röös,Kim D Thompson,J.g Ferreira ,Rachel Norman ,Edward H Allison ,S Suri ,M C M Beveridge ,Abdullah Al Mamun ,Belinda M Richardson ,Bruce J Mcadam ,Max Troell ,Shakuntala H Thilsted

doi:10.3389/fsufs.2021.703152

Abstract

The contribution of seafood to global food security is being increasingly highlighted in policy. However, the extent to which such claims are supported in the current food security literature is unclear. This review assesses the extent to which seafood is represented in the recent food security literature, both individually and from a food systems perspective, in combination with terrestrially-based production systems. The results demonstrate that seafood remains under-researched compared to the role of terrestrial animal and plant production in food security. Furthermore, seafood and terrestrial production remain siloed, with very few papers addressing the combined contribution or relations between terrestrial and aquatic systems. We conclude that far more attention is needed to the specific and relative role of seafood in global food security and call for the integration of seafood in a wider interdisciplinary approach to global food system research.

Highlights

Seafood, including the full range of animals and plants produced in water and encompassing both marine and freshwater environments, makes an important contribution to global food security—an estimated 59.6 million people depend on capture fisheries and aquaculture for their livelihoods and nutrition, and a further 3.2 billion people rely on fish to provide 20% or more of their average per capita intake of animal protein (FAO, 2018)
We present the results of the review, focusing on the prevalence of seafood in relation to terrestrial livestock and crops in the light-touch review and the content of papers focused on seafood in terms of the importance given to seafood, the quality of this analysis and the degree to which an interdisciplinary food systems perspective is currently applied
We delimited the scoping review to seven key themes related to food security: “production,” “nutrition,” “behavior,” “consumption,” “modeling,” “resource use,” and “safety.” These themes were inductively generated by the Sustainable Seafood Consumption Initiative (SSCI)1e based on interdisciplinary research experience, and agreed at the first SSCI international meeting, which brought together and provided input from over 50 experts representing more than 15 countries across Europe, South East Asia, Africa, and North America, from a diverse range of disciplines and a mixture of terrestrial and aquatic food research backgrounds

Summary

Introduction

Seafood, including the full range of animals and plants produced in water and encompassing both marine and freshwater environments, makes an important contribution to global food security—an estimated 59.6 million people depend on capture fisheries and aquaculture for their livelihoods and nutrition, and a further 3.2 billion people rely on fish to provide 20% or more of their average per capita intake of animal protein (FAO, 2018) This consumption of seafood is important for low income regions of the world where plant and animal seafoods are a major source of essential nutrients including long-chained polyunsaturated omega-3 fatty acids (Michaelsen et al, 2011; Lund, 2013), and vitamins and minerals such as calcium (Larsen et al, 2000), iron, zinc, and vitamin A (Roos et al, 2007). Much of the literature on seafood security is “siloed” with attention given to the role of marine and freshwater animal and plant production consumption largely in isolation from the terrestrial food with which it is consumed (Béné et al, 2015)

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Results

Conclusion