Even countries with top fisheries management are likely consuming seafood with lower sustainability standards and contributing to unsustainable fishing practices of countries with lower management, according to a study published in PLOS One (Disparities between sustainability of country-level seafood production and consumption. Kayla M. Blincow,
Freshwater and marine products sourced from wild capture and aquaculture fisheries, referred to from here onward as seafood, play a critical role in global food systems. In 2017, approximately 3.3 billion people derived 20 percent of their animal protein intake from fish, with this percentage being even higher for many developing and small island nations. In addition to providing sustenance, seafood and fishing industries are an important source of jobs and income for many people around the world, supporting the livelihoods of more than 10 percent of the global population. As demand for fisheries as a source of food and livelihoods increases, so do potential negative environmental impacts stemming from unsustainable fishing (e.g. loss of biodiversity, fisheries-induced evolution through artificial selection for biological traits due to fishing practices and altered trophic dynamics).
Sustainable fisheries can be defined in many ways. The effectiveness of these indicators (and thus fisheries management) is dependent on the quality of data available, the usage of appropriate modeling methods, and ultimately, the successful application of regulatory efforts. As such, one measure of fisheries sustainability on the scale of countries is the relative level of fisheries management and enforcement. Increased fisheries management intensity is associated with more sustainable fisheries production. That is, countries that are better equipped to establish strong fisheries management, particularly in reference to enforcement, fishing regulations, and capacity to conduct stock assessments, have relatively few overfished stocks.
Similarly, within aquaculture, countries that have the stability and capacity to support strong property rights and establish regulatory oversight of the industry have more strongly managed and sustainable aquaculture production. While countries with stronger capacity to manage their fisheries generally produce sustainable seafood, the sustainability of their consumption is the product of both locally produced seafood and imports from other countries—the latter operating outside the bounds of national fisheries management.
Trade in seafood products is increasingly globalized. As some of the most traded food commodities in the world, 78 percent of seafood products experience competition from international trade and 38 percent of all fisheries production enters international trade markets. The globalization of seafood markets means that countries are not just consuming seafood products that they produce themselves but rather are a part of a vast network of international seafood trade that derives products from many different sources. This creates potential for a mismatch between seafood production and seafood consumption sustainability.
Countries associated with more sustainable seafood production, on average, consume seafood products at lower sustainability levels than what they produce. Countries that are known for producing well-managed, sustainable seafood are leaning heavily on countries with less sustainable management practices to supply the seafood they consume.
Those countries at the upper end of seafood production sustainability, which are known for maintaining well-managed fisheries stocks, will inevitably see decreases in the sustainability of their seafood consumption the more they rely on imports from other countries. We found that the percent change between production and consumption sustainability for the most sustainable producers was surprisingly large; for instance, the highest disparities by country included the USA (22.95 percent decrease from production to consumption sustainability), Canada (13.89 percent), and the United Kingdom (10.28 percent). For the aquaculture exclusion analysis, we found the highest disparities among the USA (23.43 percent), New Zealand (14.48 percent), Canada (12.02 percent), and the United Kingdom (10.54 percent). There also was a shift in the top 25 seafood producers, with Argentina and India no longer making the top 25 and New Zealand and South Africa being added.
Our findings not only highlight the overall disparity in management intensity globally, but also the tendency for countries to trade across this management intensity gradient. Many countries, especially in the developed world, are net importers of seafood, meaning they consume more than they produce. It follows that the sustainability of their seafood consumption will shift principally based on the countries from which they import.
In general, developed countries import most of their seafood products from developing countries. Decreased fisheries production in developed countries, potentially because of declines in stock status and more stringent management in recent years, has led to an increased reliance on seafood imports among these countries. An increase in the production and export of seafood from the developing world has largely met this demand. Fisheries management and governance in the developing world is generally less extensive than in the developed world, and as such this flow of exports from developing to developed countries contributes to a discrepancy in the overall sustainability of seafood consumption in developed countries compared to their production. This relationship is reflected in our analysis results.
Furthermore, developing countries tend to import less seafood and rely more heavily on their own production to supply their seafood consumption. As such, in both developed and developing countries, seafood consumption is heavily reliant on products that are subject to less stringent sustainability standards. We can see this relationship clearly in our examination of the USA, the largest importer of seafood globally across the time period we studied. The USA is estimated to rely on imports for 62–65 percent of its seafood consumption. Every trade partner in the top 25 sources of imports to the USA from 2012–2017 had lower fisheries production sustainability than the USA, which is largely to be expected given that the USA is one of the top producers of sustainable seafood. Any country on the upper end of the production sustainability spectrum will see a decrease in their consumption sustainability if they engage in seafood trade; however, most USA imports originated from countries from the lower half of the production sustainability spectrum.
From the perspective of the largest exporters of seafood, it is apparent that the observed disparities in sustainability are exacerbated by the dominance of China in the seafood export market. In both of our analyses, China accounted for over 20 percent of global exports of seafood. This is due to their own substantial seafood production but is also closely linked to their dominant role in global seafood processing. Not only is China responsible for the largest proportion of exports, but those seafood products are distributed with remarkably broad global reach. As a result, the sustainability of seafood produced in China is a part of the seafood consumption sustainability budget of most countries across the globe.
Developed countries that have the capacity to do so have largely implemented intensive fisheries management that supports sustainable seafood production; however, a country’s seafood consumption is the result of a complex network of global production and trade. We demonstrated that even the countries with the best fisheries management are likely consuming seafood held to much lower sustainability standards. It follows that these high production sustainability countries are contributing via their seafood consumption to the economic drivers behind the unsustainable fishing practices of countries with less intensive management. Thus, any assessment of national seafood sustainability that does not account for the role of trade in seafood consumption will continue to paint a skewed picture of sustainability that is particularly rosy for the wealthiest countries.