"The future of food from the sea"

From the journal Nature, August 19:

Abstract

Global food demand is rising, and serious questions remain about whether supply can increase sustainably¹. Land-based expansion is possible but may exacerbate climate change and biodiversity loss, and compromise the delivery of other ecosystem services^2,3,4,5,6. As food from the sea represents only 17% of the current production of edible meat, we ask how much food we can expect the ocean to sustainably produce by 2050. Here we examine the main food-producing sectors in the ocean—wild fisheries, finfish mariculture and bivalve mariculture—to estimate ‘sustainable supply curves’ that account for ecological, economic, regulatory and technological constraints. We overlay these supply curves with demand scenarios to estimate future seafood production. We find that under our estimated demand shifts and supply scenarios (which account for policy reform and technology improvements), edible food from the sea could increase by 21–44 million tonnes by 2050, a 36–74% increase compared to current yields. This represents 12–25% of the estimated increase in all meat needed to feed 9.8 billion people by 2050. Increases in all three sectors are likely, but are most pronounced for mariculture. Whether these production potentials are realized sustainably will depend on factors such as policy reforms, technological innovation and the extent of future shifts in demand.

MainHuman population growth, rising incomes and preference shifts will considerably increase global demand for nutritious food in the coming decades. Malnutrition and hunger still plague many countries^1,7, and projections of population and income by 2050 suggest a future need for more than 500 megatonnes (Mt) of meat per year for human consumption (Supplementary Information section 1.1.6). Scaling up the production of land-derived food crops is challenging, because of declining yield rates and competition for scarce land and water resources². Land-derived seafood (freshwater aquaculture and inland capture fisheries; we use seafood to denote any aquatic food resource, and food from the sea for marine resources specifically) has an important role in food security and global supply, but its expansion is also constrained. Similar to other land-based production, the expansion of land-based aquaculture has resulted in substantial environmental externalities that affect water, soil, biodiversity and climate, and which compromise the ability of the environment to produce food^3,4,5,6. Despite the importance of terrestrial aquaculture in seafood production (Supplementary Fig. 3), many countries—notably China, the largest inland-aquaculture producer—have restricted the use of land and public waters for this purpose, which constrains expansion⁸. Although inland capture fisheries are important for food security, their contribution to total global seafood production is limited (Supplementary Table 1) and expansion is hampered by ecosystem constraints. Thus, to meet future needs (and recognizing that land-based sources of fish and other foods are also part of the solution), we ask whether the sustainable production of food from the sea has an important role in future supply.

Food from the sea is produced from wild fisheries and species farmed in the ocean (mariculture), and currently accounts for 17% of the global production of edible meat^9,10,11,12 (Supplementary Information section 1.1, Supplementary Tables 1–3). In addition to protein, food from the sea contains bioavailable micronutrients and essential fatty acids that are not easily found in land-based foods, and is thus uniquely poised to contribute to global food and nutrition security^13,14,15,16.

....MUCH MORE