How Dependent Is the World on Aquaculture?

It crossed over. For the first time, aquaculture produced more aquatic animals than capture fisheries did, reaching 94.4 million tonnes and 51 percent of the world total according to the FAO's 2024 State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report. Total production across both hit 223.2 million tonnes.

Farmed fish also accounted for a record 57 percent of production destined for people to eat, which is the more telling figure. Wild catch gets diverted into fishmeal and other non-food uses at a much higher rate.

Why capture stopped growing

Wild landings have been roughly flat for three decades. Not falling off a cliff, just refusing to increase, because the productive stocks were already being fished at or beyond their limit by the 1990s.

That plateau is the entire reason aquaculture grew. Demand kept climbing with population and income, supply from the ocean did not, and the gap was filled by farming. The crossover in 2022 was not a sudden event. It was the point where two long-running lines finally intersected.

The dependency is uneven

"The world depends on aquaculture" flattens enormous regional differences.

Asia produces the overwhelming majority of farmed aquatic animals and consumes most of it domestically. Carp species, farmed in freshwater ponds across China, India and southeast Asia, make up a far larger share of global aquaculture tonnage than salmon does, though salmon dominates the trade press and the technology conversation because it is high value and export oriented.

In parts of west Africa and the Pacific, wild capture still supplies most animal protein and aquaculture is marginal. Those populations depend on fisheries in a way that a European supermarket shopper does not, and stock collapse there is a food security event rather than a price signal.

The feed question

Here is where the independence claim gets complicated. Farmed carnivorous species, salmon in particular, eat feed containing fishmeal and fish oil made from wild-caught small pelagics.

Anchoveta is the largest single fishery on the planet at around 4.9 million tonnes in 2022, and most of it becomes fishmeal rather than food. So a salmon farm is not fully decoupled from wild stocks. It is connected through the feed bag.

Feed formulation has shifted substantially toward plant proteins, and the ratio of wild fish input to farmed fish output has improved a great deal. It is not zero. A collapse in the Peruvian anchoveta fishery, which the El Nino cycle makes a recurring risk, propagates into salmon feed costs within a season.

What the concentration risk looks like

Aquaculture is intensive, and intensive systems fail in correlated ways. Disease moves fast through dense populations. Sea lice in salmon, early mortality syndrome in shrimp, and a range of viral outbreaks have each taken out significant regional production in a single season.

Wild fisheries fail too, though usually more slowly and for different reasons. What changed with the crossover is that a larger share of global aquatic protein now sits in systems that can lose a year's output in weeks.

Whether that is more or less fragile than depending on stocks nobody controls is genuinely arguable. It is a different shape of risk rather than obviously a smaller one.

Where it goes

Growth continues, and most of the headroom is in species low on the food chain. Bivalves and seaweed need no feed at all, take nutrients out of the water rather than adding them, and carry a fraction of the environmental cost of finfish.

Offshore expansion is the other direction, moving pens into deeper, more exposed water where flushing is better and conflict with other coastal users is lower. That trades biological problems for engineering ones, and it is what pulled subsea technology into the aquaculture sector in the first place.