Great disparity remains among countries
On 20 March 2018, FAO global aquaculture production quantity and value statistics with time series expanded to cover 67 years (1950-2016) were released for open access.
The global statistics on capture and aquaculture annually updated and published by the FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department rank high among all FAO statistical related products for the number of worldwide users.
In 2016, a total of 80 million tonnes of farmed food fish (US$231.6 billion) and 30.1 million tonnes of aquatic algae (US$11.7 billion) were produced in the world. Farmed food fish include 54.1 million tonnes of finfish (US$138.5 billion), 17.1 million tonnes of molluscs (US$29.2 billion), 7.9 million tonnes of crustaceans(US$57.1 billion), and 938.5 thousand tonnes of miscellaneous aquatic animals (US$6.8 billion) such as turtles, sea cucumbers, frogs and edible jellyfish. Non- food products (pearls, shells, etc.) were 37.9 thousand tonnes, valued at US$214.6 million, in the same year.
Also for 2016, data show that the greatly uneven distribution of aquaculture production and disparity in the level of sectoral development across the world and within regions remains largely unchanged so far, with the majority of low income food deficit countries having an aquaculture production still too low to support the achievement of their national food and nutrition security.
In general FAO’s aquaculture production volume data are of considerably higher reliability and accuracy than value data.
Since last year, special effort was made to improve the previously understated production value for several major producers including
China. World aquaculture value in the new published data is considerably higher than in previous releases.
Ideally, all FAO statistical data on aquaculture should have been reported by the competent authorities of producing countries
and territories around the world.
In reality this does not occur for all the producing countries. Published FAO data include official statistical data reported by governments, or harvested from known resources by FAO for a few countries that do not report to FAO, and estimates made by statistician for all the other countries with official data
unavailable or unknown to FAO.
FAO received just below 120 national data reports for the Written by: Xiaowei Zhou
FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture
Department, Rome, Italy
E-mail: Xiaowei.Zhou@fao.org
