Sustainability and food security are closely interrelated. A key challenge is to provide food to a growing world population. Seafood from the capture fishery and aquaculture sectors is expected to provide part of the solution.
Also, in a world facing stressors like overfishing and climate change, the opportunities for growth in capture fishery production are limited, meaning that most growth in seafood will need to come from aquaculture. Aquaculture comes with a separate set of sustainability challenges, including impacts on fish welfare and ocean health.
Additionally, the global seafood sector faces challenges like illicit trade and a lack of transparency, emphasizing the urgency of global measures that address sustainability challenges and safeguard both food security and livelihoods.
Modelling seafood supply chains to understand food system pain points
The Seafood Forecast untangles some of the complexities in seafood value chains and provides an objective view of developments to mid-century. The global forecast of the seafood industry considers the most likely future for both marine capture fisheries and marine aquaculture, including key components in the value chain, such as fish feed and the global seafood trade.
It analyses the future potential of the seafood system, considering the most probable future for the global food system and the Blue Economy. The forecast focuses on the seafood from the ocean and does not cover fisheries and aquaculture in freshwater inland.
The project approach takes a systemic and balanced view of seafood markets, taking into consideration the main drivers of seafood consumption, including competition among alternative protein sources, and considers the primary causal relationships and interlinkages in seafood supply chains. The modelling of seafood value chains in the Blue Economy gives a better understanding of where the pain points are in terms of data collection, reporting, quality, and standardization.
The benefits
The Seafood Forecast sees seafood production and supply chains in the wider context of large system transitions in the Blue Economy. These system transitions include interactions between seafood value chains and other food systems, between the need for sustainable feed in balance with food, and between food security and growing supply-demand imbalances across different regions.
The forecast also provides novel insights into the future of seafood value chains, including a view on trade, sourcing of feed, and technological innovation. In addition, the forecast will serve as input towards increased traceability and transparency as well as greater understanding of the development of seafood in the Blue Economy at both the global and regional scale. It can also provide decision support to industry, policymakers, and investors, on how to strategically prioritize actions to drive future seafood demand. Given a sufficient change in demand, expanding marine aquaculture represents a significant opportunity in the Blue Economy around the world.
Market potential
Marine aquaculture must maintain a focus on technological innovation and sustainability measures to meet future growth. DNV forecasts that the supply-demand imbalances will drive a 50% increase in trade by 2050 and seafood will remain among the world’s most traded food products.
One key priority for the aquaculture industry will be to meet the demand for feed ingredients by decoupling it from sources of food for human consumption. The Seafood Forecast shows that the share of novel ingredients will rise from negligible levels today to around 30%.
Links to more information:
Full report: Seafood Forecast DNV
Executive summary: Executive Summary