The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2010 - FAO

World review of fisheries and aquaculture
5
Figure 2
World fish utilization and supply
Fish utilization
(million tonnes)
120
Population (billions)
and food supply (kg/capita)
18
100
80
Food
Non-food uses
Population
Food supply
15
12
60
9
40
6
20
3
0
50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 00 05 08
0
production statistics and applied to statistics for 2006 onwards. The revision was
based on the outcome of China’s 2006 National Agricultural Census, which contained
questions on fish production for the first time, as well as on results from various
pilot sample surveys, most of which were conducted in collaboration with FAO.
While revisions varied according to species, area and sector, the overall result was a
downward correction of fishery and aquaculture production statistics for 2006 of about
13.5 percent. FAO subsequently estimated revisions for its historical statistics for China
for 1997–2005. Notice of the impending revision by China had been given in The State
of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008. Because of the major importance of China
in the global context, China is in some cases discussed separately from the rest of the
world in this publication.
Global capture fisheries production in 2008 was about 90 million tonnes, with
an estimated first-sale value of US$93.9 billion, comprising about 80 million tonnes
from marine waters and a record 10 million tonnes from inland waters (Table 1 and
Figure 3). World capture fisheries production has been relatively stable in the past
decade (Figure 3), with the exception of marked fluctuations driven by catches of
anchoveta – a species extremely susceptible to oceanographic conditions determined by
the El Niño Southern Oscillation – in the Southeast Pacific. Fluctuations in other species
and regions tend to compensate for each other to a large extent. In 2008, China, Peru
and Indonesia were the top producing countries. China remained by far the global
leader with production of about 15 million tonnes.
Although the revision of China’s fishery statistics reduced reported catches by about
2 million tonnes per year in the Northwest Pacific, this area still leads by far the ranking
of marine fishing areas, followed by the Southeast Pacific, the Western Central Pacific
and the Northeast Atlantic. The same species have dominated marine catches since
2003, with the top ten species accounting for about 30 percent of all marine catches.
Catches from inland waters, two-thirds of which were reported as being taken in Asia
in 2008, have shown a slowly but steadily rising trend since 1950, owing in part to stock
enhancement practices and possibly also to some improvements in reporting, which
still remains poor for inland water fisheries (with small-scale and subsistence fisheries
substantially underrepresented in the statistics).
Aquaculture continues to be the fastest-growing animal-food-producing sector and
to outpace population growth, with per capita supply from aquaculture increasing
from 0.7 kg in 1970 to 7.8 kg in 2008, an average annual growth rate of 6.6 percent.