A Surfeit of Seafood
During a recent trip to a big discount store, I spent time perusing the seafood selection. I was amazed at the variety of seafood available, which far exceeded my local grocery store. One entire cooler was filled with farmed salmon from Chile, and another with farmed salmon from Norway. A third included previously frozen wild salmon from Alaska (not being the season for fresh wild salmon). There were filets of Tilapia, Mahi-Mahi, Swordfish, Chilean Seabass, and Red Snapper. There were shrimp from Argentina, Ecuador, Vietnam, and Thailand, and Lobster from Australia and Canada. Faced with such a surfeit of seafood, how does one choose between them? Are they all equally nutritious? Are they all sustainable? Would choosing one over another have some downstream socio-economic ramifications that I should be concerned about?
As consumers of seafood, we need to make informed decisions about what to eat using a variety of criteria. These may include what is available, what is affordable, what is healthy, what is sustainable, what contributes to social welfare, and what has the least environmental impact. And we need other information that supports our decision-making process. How much fish do we catch and eat? Where does it come from? Should we care? Why are some fisheries sustainable while others are not? Are some fish healthier for us than others? Does it matter if the fish is wild, cultivated, fresh, or frozen? In this article I will begin to explore those questions.
Before we embark on this discussion, let’s define a few terms. My use of the term Seafood refers to any consumable items derived from aquatic sources, marine or freshwater. Capture refers to foods caught or taken from wild populations, whereas Aquaculture refers to foods cultivated in defined spaces either indoors or outdoors. Because most of the world records their production in metric tons (tons), I also use those units. As a reminder, one metric ton is 1000 kg, or 2204 lbs, equivalent to a cubic meter of water; 1000 tons equals 2.2 million lbs, and 1 million tons equals 2.2 billion lbs. Much of the data that I cite come from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) world fishery statistics database. [1]
World Fish Production: How much do we catch?
During WWII, fishing activities declined as most of the world’s fishing fleets were converted to military use. One result was that fish populations were given a breather for about 7 years, during which they grew substantially. Following WWII, industrial development increased rapidly as industries converted from wartime to peacetime production. The fishing industry benefited from the introduction of larger vessels, engines, nets, and electronics (especially sonar and loran), and landings increased rapidly. In the 1960s, worldwide fishery landings reached 30 million tons, but scientists still thought fish populations were unlimited, and predicted that landings would increase to 500 million tons per year.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, production of capture fisheries reached about 90 million tons in the 1980s and has been level ever since. Fish populations, as it turned out, were not limitless, and uncontrolled fishing drove many to such low levels as to become commercially extinct. Meanwhile, per capita consumption of seafood doubled from about 10 kg per person in the 1960s to 20.2 kg per person in 2020. In the last 70 years, the world population has grown increasingly dependent on seafood as a protein source. Seafood production now employs 58.5 million people, of which 21% are women.
As of 2022, most (78%) of the seafood caught from the wild are fish. About half of that is a mixed bag of species like grouper, snapper, flounder, and reef-fish. After that, the most commonly caught fish are forage fish, including small species such as anchovies, sardines, pilchards, and smelt. Next come the Gadids, including cod, pollock, hake, and their relatives, followed by tuna and mackerel. The worlds largest fishery is for Peruvian Anchoveta, at 4.9 million tons; second is Alaska Pollock at 3.5 million tons. Mollusks make up 15% of the catch, and crustaceans comprise 7%.
The rest of this episode is available to paid subscribers. In it, I will reveal where our fish come from, why some fish populations have collapsed, how“Freedom of the Seas” became “Tragedy of the Commons”, and how fishery management has evolved to prevent this.
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