July 9, 2024 — For the first time in history, we now farm more seafood than we catch from the wild. At the same time, overfishing of wild fish stocks continues to increase even as the number of sustainably fished stocks declines.
That’s according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) latest “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture” (SOFIA) report. The 2024 instalment of the report, a biennial collection of data that outlines the FAO’s vision for the fishing and aquaculture sectors, was released June 8 at a high-level ocean stakeholder event in Costa Rica. It tempers aquaculture progress with a warning that fisheries management is failing to adequately support sustainable wild fish stocks.
The report summarizes the FAO’s “Blue Transformation road map” and encourages countries to implement it. In 2021, the FAO launched the road map, a strategy for meeting the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14), Life Below Water, by 2030, to improve the social, economic and environmental sustainability of aquatic food and feed more people more equitably. Sustainably growing aquaculture and better managing fisheries are central to the Blue Transformation road map, but progress is “either moving much too slowly or has regressed,” the report says.
“The FAO’s ambition for a Blue Transformation is necessary, admirable and ambitious,” Bryce Stewart, a senior research fellow at the U.K.-based Marine Biological Association, told Mongabay. “It appears to have resulted in improved data and a higher profile for blue foods from fisheries and aquaculture as a key way to addressing global issues around inadequate nutrition and inequality.”