Fishing feeds the world
AS we commemorate World Fisheries Day on Nov 21 every year, let us take this time to think about the frequently underappreciated work of small-scale fisheries communities, particularly the fishers, processors and traders who gather aquatic foods from ponds, rivers, lakes and oceans all over the world.
To secure sustainable fisheries and healthy oceans in the face of the challenge posed by climate change, Worldfish collaborates with partners to bring shared prosperity through aquatic food systems by providing essential knowledge and innovations to those who need them most.
Roughly 90% of the fisheries sector’s workforce comprises smallscale actors, half of whom are women. Fisheries remain a critical component of global food systems. Most aquatic foods consumed in a large portion of the developing world will continue to be supplied by small-scale fisheries in the coming decades, notwithstanding the expansion of aquaculture.
The wide variety of aquatic foods obtained from fisheries – such as seaweed, sea cucumbers, crustaceans and fish – contributes to robust, sustainable and diversified diets as well as revenue streams from the accompanying trading and processing activities across the supply chain.
Aquatic foods provide over three billion people with micronutrientrich diets and sustain the livelihoods of over 120 million people. They rank among the most traded commodities in the world. The production of capture fisheries worldwide in 2020 was 90.3 million tonnes, valued at an estimated Us$141bil (Rm645.5bil), with 78.8 million tonnes coming from marine waters and 11.5 million tonnes coming from inland waters.
For billions of people worldwide, coastal and inland fisheries are essential to their livelihoods as well as access to food and nutrition. They are, however, the ones most impacted by the effects of a changing climate. From the migration of fishing stocks due to an increase in water temperature and change in salinity of their habitats to the changes in sea levels inundating coastal regions, climate change will have an adverse effect on those who depend on coastal and inland fisheries.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has declared this year the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture (IYAFA). The purpose of IYAFA is to honour the millions of women and men who work in artisanal fisheries and aquaculture, as well as the workers in the broader aquatic food systems, who every day feed billions of people around the world with wholesome, nutritious food, making a significant contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goal of a world without hunger.
(The Sustainable Development Goals are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet.)
In conjunction with World Fisheries Day and the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture, we urge everyone to learn more about fisheries and aquatic foods as an integral component of the world’s food systems.
WORLDFISH
Worldfish is an international, nonprofit research and innovation organisation working on reducing hunger, malnutrition and poverty across Africa, Asia and the Pacific.