Unlocking the potential of aquatic foods in global food security and nutrition: A missing piece under the lens of seafood liking index

Abstract

Fish and seafood (seafoods in short) are nutritious and environment-friendly aquatic foods that receive increasing attention for their existing and potential contribution to global food security and nutrition. With a general perception or premise that growing and wealthier world population would demand much more seafoods to satisfy their needs for more foods and better nutrition, contemporary policy discourses in global communities focus on how to sustainably increase seafood production to satisfy the needs of world population with minimal detrimental impacts on the planet. A closer look at global seafood consumption, however, reveals large discrepancies across countries. Beneath growing world seafood consumption lies low or declined per capita seafood consumption in many countries. Based on the experiences of nearly 200 countries (accounting for over 99 percent of world population) during the 2010s, we found that income and price explained only a small portion of variations in countries' seafood consumption, and differences in countries' per capita seafood consumption mostly reflect large variations in their seafood preferences. We estimated a seafood liking index (SLI) to compare countries' preferences for a specific seafood and an associated seafood substitution index (SSI) to compare a country's preferences for different seafoods. Key findings and their implications are discussed in main text; more comprehensive results are documented in supplementary materials. Our study is a first attempt to measure seafood preferences at global scope by disaggregate seafood groups. Its comprehensive results can provide guidance to policy and planning at the national, regional and global levels. The methodology of SLI and SSI is a novel approach that can be applied to examine seafood preferences within a country, which tend to have large variations across sub-national districts.