Globalization of wild capture and farmed aquatic foods

Aquatic foods are among the most highly traded foods, with nearly 60 million tonnes exported in 2020, representing 11% of global agriculture trade by value 1. Despite the vast scale, basic characteristics of aquatic food trade, including the species, origin, and farmed versus wild sourcing, are largely unknown due to fundamental mismatches between production and trade data. Without detailed trade data, we have only a coarse picture of aquatic food consumption patterns 2. Here, we present a global database of species trade flows and compute consumption for all farmed and wild, marine and freshwater aquatic foods from 1996-2020. The database consists of over 2400 species/species groups, 193 countries, and over 35 million bilateral records. We show that aquatic foods have become increasingly globalized, with the share of production exported increasing by 40% since 1996. However, trends differ across aquatic food sectors, with marine capture fisheries remaining the most highly globalized group despite stagnating production. We find intraregional trade is generally greater than interregional trade, particularly for aquaculture. We also show that global consumption increased 26% despite declining marine capture consumption. Reliance on foreign-sourced aquatic foods increased globally but reliance ranges from 9% foreign product consumption in Asia to 65% in Europe. Finally, although the diversity of domestic-sourced consumption is typically higher than that of foreign-sourced consumption, overall aquatic food consumption diversity is positively associated with trade. As we As we look for sustainable diet opportunities among aquatic foods, our findings and underlying database link consumption to producing environments across the diversity of aquatic foods and enable greater monitoring of the role of trade in rapidly evolving aquatic food systems. Thus, the higher resolution provides important insights for sustainable sourcing and how aquatic food trade adds to food resilience.