Medidas de Gestao das Pescarias Marinhas e Aquicultura 2019 The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2018 | Page 42

PART 1 WORLD REVIEW
» scale of world microalgae farming because of
The China factor
unavailable data from important producers such
as Australia, France, India, Israel, Japan,
Malaysia and Myanmar.
China has produced more farmed food fish than
the rest of the world combined ever y year since
1991. Although its contribution has gradually
decreased since the late 1990s, the great
importance of Chinese aquaculture and its
implications for world total fish supply are not
likely to fade soon. Since production of farmed
food fish exceeded that of wild-caught fish for the
first time in 1993, aquaculture’s share has
steadily increased to 73.7 percent in 2016, and it
is expected to expand further. The countr y’s
abilit y to feed its large population with
domestically produced fish from aquaculture
contributes to world food securit y and nutrition
as a whole.
Aquaculture production distribution and major
producers
Of the 202 currently existing countries and
territories with aquaculture production recorded
by FAO, 194 have been active producers in the
past few years. The prevailing uneven production
distribution pattern among regions and among
countries within the same region has remained
pronounced and largely unchanged in the past
decade despite major changes in absolute
production (Table 10). Asia has accounted for about
89 percent of world aquaculture production for
over two decades. Over the same period, Africa
and the Americas have lifted their respective
shares in world total production, while those of
Europe and Oceania have dropped slightly.
Among major producing countries, Eg ypt,
Nigeria, Chile, India, Indonesia, Viet Nam,
Bangladesh and Norway have strengthened their
share in regional or world production to var ying
degree over the past two decades. China has
gradually weakened its share in global production
from 65 percent in 1995 to less than 62 percent in
2016.
In the past few years, the Chinese fisher y and
aquaculture sector has experienced gradual but
accelerated transformation in several aspects as a
result of adjustment in public policies as well as
consumer and market inf luences at home and
abroad that affect the entire production value
chain. Transformation within the sector includes
greater attention to environmental responsibilit y
and sustainabilit y; qualit y improvement and
product diversit y; improved economic efficiency
and benefits to fish farmers; and strengthened
business integration along the value chain and
economies of scale. The national Thirteenth Five-
Year Plan for Fisheries Development, together
with other newly introduced public policies and
reg ulations, is rapidly pushing greater changes
(see Box 31 in the projections section of Part 4,
page 183). Unlike most of the previous five-year
development plans, the new plan sets no
production targets for aquaculture. However,
several large-scale undertakings in Chinese
aquaculture are having noticeable effects.
As illustrated in Figure 9, while the level of overall
aquaculture development varies greatly among
and within geographical regions, a few major
producers dominate the production of main
groups of farmed species produced in inland
aquaculture and in marine and coastal
aquaculture. Inland finfish farming is dominated
by developing countries, while a number of
developed countries are major contributors to
world marine finfish farming, especially cold-
water species. Marine shrimps dominate the
production of crustaceans t ypically farmed in
coastal aquaculture, and are an important source
of foreign exchange earnings for a number of
developing countries in Asia and Latin America.
Although the quantit y of marine molluscs
produced by China dwarfs that of all other
producers, a number of countries in all regions
rely rather heavily on mussels, oysters and, to a
lesser extent, abalone for their aquaculture
production.
Across the countr y, aquaculture operations,
together with animal husbandr y, are approved or
prohibited based on environmental assessment
under a new zoning exercise. Results have
included the large-scale removal of fish pens and
cages from lakes, rivers and reser voirs to
eliminate fed-species aquaculture in many
provinces. In Hubei, for example, the largest
inland aquaculture producer in the countr y for
over two decades, between December 2016 and
March 2017 all fish pens and cages were removed
from several major lakes where fish farming was »
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