Why is aquaculture important?
According to WWF, 85% of the world's marine populations are either fully exploited or overexploited. Our planet's population is forecast to increase by more than 2 billion people by 2050, and with this growth will come a much greater demand for food, including seafood. Because there is negligible scope for capture fisheries to increase their catches, aquaculture needs to close the gap between supply and demand in the long term, while doing its best to reduce pressure on wild capture fisheries as well.
There are many reasons to be optimistic about the increasingly important role of aquaculture in the global food supply. The 'State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture' reports, published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), state that any future growth in fish production and consumption will come mainly from aquaculture. As a result, the industry is up to the challenge: in the decade 2005-2014, farmed seafood production grew at a healthy 5.8% per year, which was four times the annual growth of the world's population between 2010 and 2014.
Undoubtedly, aquaculture is best positioned to address the considerable imbalance that exists between the amount of water available to us as a planet and its contribution to the human diet: currently, the oceans provide only 2% of the food we eat despite occupying 70% of the Earth's surface.
Aquaculture is also one of the world's most efficient and sustainable methods of producing high-quality protein. The industry has a low carbon footprint and feed conversion ratio (FCR), as well as high protein and energy retention. Skretting offers innovative and sustainable nutritional solutions that better support the performance of farmed fish and prawns.
