Saving Seafood

Sullivan reintroduces sweeping bill targeting bycatch, seafloor impacts

July 8, 2026 — U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) has reintroduced the Bycatch Reduction Act, legislation that would expand federal efforts to reduce bycatch, limit seafloor impacts from trawl gear, improve fisheries monitoring and increase transparency in fishery management.

According to Sullivan’s office, the bill builds on recommendations from the Alaska Salmon Task Force, which was created through legislation he authored and signed into law in 2022.

The proposal would establish new standards and monitoring requirements designed to keep both midwater and bottom trawl nets off the seafloor, require proven salmon excluder devices on pollock vessels, invest in salmon tagging and genetic sampling, expand ecosystem research, and create a new flume tank testing facility to evaluate fishing gear under simulated ocean conditions. The bill also would reauthorize NOAA’s Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program and encourage fishermen to test new gear and technologies aimed at reducing bycatch and habitat impacts.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Aquatic animal and terrestrial meat trades now almost on par, FAO report finds

July 1, 2026 — Rapid aquaculture growth has pushed farmed aquatic animal production to more than 100 million metric tons per year for the first time ever, boosting the trade value of all aquatic animal products almost to parity with the trade value of land-produced meat.

That’s according to the latest “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture” (SOFIA) report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The 2026 installment of the report, a biennial collection of data that outlines FAO’s vision for the fishing and aquaculture sectors, was released June 16 at the 11th Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya.

“The [aquaculture] sector is evolving very rapidly,” Manuel Barange, director of the FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Division, told Mongabay. “It’s now achieving levels that fisheries never did. And that is positive because there’s no doubt about it that we’re going to be 10 billion in just a couple or three decades. And everyone has a right to food.”

Connecting science and policy

SOFIA is “one of the most authoritative reports we have,” Paul Orina, director general of the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, said at a Mombasa press conference to launch the report. Its value lies in how it “connects science with policy,” he said.

The FAO has been giving policymakers, scientists and civil society a deep dive into the global fisheries and aquaculture sectors since 1995, with SOFIA 2026 bringing in data through 2024. The flagship report reviews FAO and broader U.N. statistics, including those FAO has been collecting on around 500 fish stocks globally since 1974.

It provides data, analysis and projections that inform decision-making internationally, and documents measurable progress of FAO’s Blue Transformation. This road map for meeting the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14), Life Below Water, by 2030, was launched in 2021. It aims to improve the social, economic and environmental sustainability of aquatic foods, and to feed more people more equitably despite growing challenges from climate change, pollution and biodiversity degradation.

Read the full article at Mongabay

FAO: Seafood fraud affecting up to 20 percent of global trade

Apirl 14, 2026 — Fraud may affect as much as 20 percent of the world’s seafood trade, according to a new report from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The report, “Food fraud in the fisheries and aquaculture sector,” reviewed how fraud occurs across seafood supply chains and examined how emerging analytical tools, including DNA testing, isotope analysis, and nuclear magnetic resonance, can help regulators detect mislabeling and other forms of deception.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

OPINION: Sustainable aquaculture: The path forward

July 11, 2024 —  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has highlighted the need for aquaculture to grow in order to help feed the growing human population to 2050 – but that growth has to be managed sustainably. For the past 25 years, the use of marine ingredients in aquaculture has been a subject of concern. In the 1980s and 1990s, many farmed fish diets were predominantly based on fishmeal and fish oil, both of which are rich sources of nutrients, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids. However, as the industry expanded, the demand for these marine resources grew in parallel, raising critical questions about the sustainability of using fish to feed fish, especially when these marine resources could potentially feed people directly.

The solution has been to convert less palatable fish into high-demand products like salmon, seabass, seabream, or shrimp while ensuring that our sourcing practices have minimum impact on marine ecosystems. However, as aquaculture grows further to feed more people, so does the potential demand for fishmeal and fish oil, which is also sought after by other industries. With this increasing competition for a finite resource, how do we identify and develop sustainable alternatives while continuing to use these marine ingredients responsibly?

Read the full article at Aquafeed.com

More fish were farmed than caught for the first time ever

June 18, 2024 — A new report from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, has found that more fish were farmed worldwide in 2022 than harvested from the wild, an apparent first.

Last week, the FAO released its annual report on the state of aquaculture — which refers to the farming of both seafood and aquatic plants — and fisheries around the world. The organization found that global production from both aquaculture and fisheries reached a new high — 223.3 million metric tons of animals and plants — in 2022. Of that, 185.4 million metric tons were aquatic animals, and 37.8 million metric tons were algae. Aquaculture was responsible for 51 percent of aquatic animal production in 2022, or 94.4 metric tons.

The milestone was in many ways an expected one, given the world’s insatiable appetite for seafood. Since 1961, consumption of seafood has grown at twice the annual rate of the global population, according to the FAO. Because production levels from fisheries are not expected to change significantly in the future, meeting the growing global demand for seafood almost certainly necessitates an increase in aquaculture.

Though fishery production levels fluctuate from year to year, “it’s not like there’s new fisheries out there waiting to be discovered,” said Dave Martin, program director for Sustainable Fisheries Partnerships, an international organization that works to reduce the environmental impact of seafood supply chains. “So any growth in consumption of seafood is going to come from aquaculture.”

Read the full article at Grist

Nine Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Aquaculture

September 24, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

1. It’s Not Just for Fish

Many aquaculture producers in the United States don’t raise fish, despite the industry’s popular image of fish farming. In fact, oysters were the most commercially valuable domestic farmed marine species in recent years. In 2017, oyster farmers harvested 36 million pounds valued at $186 million. And clams ranked number two in production value in 2012–2017. Other top U.S. marine aquaculture products include mussels, shrimps, and salmon.

In recent years, a growing number of entrepreneurs are also turning to kelp to supply sustainable seafood and coastal jobs.

2. More than Half of the World’s Seafood Comes from Aquaculture

Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing forms of food production. Global marine and freshwater aquaculture production rose by 527 percent between 1990 and 2018 according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Although most of that production happens outside the United States, farmed products still make up a large portion of American’s seafood diet. We import more than 85 percent of our seafood, and half of that is from aquaculture. In contrast, U.S. marine and freshwater aquaculture accounts for only a small portion of our domestic seafood supply.

Read the full release here

FAO leaders assess state of the world’s fisheries at sustainability symposium

November 20, 2019 — The number of overfished stocks has been growing for years, but the commonly cited statistic that 90 percent of stocks are in peril doesn’t accurately reflect the health of the world’s oceans.

Manual Barange, the policy and resource director at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Fisheries and Aquaculture division, carefully differentiated maximally fished stocks and overfished stocks during his keynote address at FAO’s International Symposium on Sustainable Fisheries in Rome, Italy this week.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

FAO paper predicts impact of climate change on world’s fisheries, aquaculture

August 20, 2019 — Climate change will decrease the world fisheries’ overall maximum catch potential between 2.8% and 12.1% by 2050 based on different greenhouse gas emission scenarios, with the tropics, especially the South Pacific region, getting hit the hardest, says a team of technical experts organized by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

It’s not just the oceans either. As water becomes more scarce, inland fisheries will be undervalued. Pakistan, Iraq, Morocco and Spain are all highlighted as countries that are currently facing high stresses that are projected to become even higher in the future.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Ocean-wide biomass declines projected due to climate change

August 13, 2019 — Climate change will cause fish biomass to decline 5 percent for every one degree Celsius of warming, according to the most comprehensive analysis of marine ecosystem models to date.

The study, which was authored by 35 researchers from 12 countries, combines multiple climate and ecosystem models to create an ensemble model that estimates future global marine biomass — the total weight of all the fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals in the ocean.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

FAO expects uncertainty to restrain 2019 global seafood trade, despite strong demand

July 25, 2019 — In its annual outlook for the world’s seafood market, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicted a “flat or marginal growth” in seafood supply over 2019, with global seafood demand continuing to grow.

The forecast, created by the team of seafood analysts in the FAO’s Globefish unit, predicts that total global wild catch will drop by approximately 3.4% in 2019, as catches of cod, mackerel and octopus remain low, while the world’s tuna fisheries have also been less productive than they were during the first half of 2018.

Meanwhile, global aquaculture production is set to increase by 4%, although supply is likely to remain tight for major species such as salmon, according to Globefish.

The team has estimated that 177.8 million metric tons of fish will be produced worldwide in 2019, of which roughly 89% will go towards direct human consumption. This, in turn, means that global per capita seafood consumption is estimated at 20.5 kg.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News