CMF, Changing Markets Foundation (2026) Growth without Guardrails: The UN’s aquaculture policy is undermining food security. Changing Markets Foundation.
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The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was founded after the Second World War with a clear mandate: to raise levels of nutrition, improve access to food, conserve natural resources and help free humanity from hunger. It is promoting major expansion of aquaculture as a means of advancing food security, nutrition and climate action—but without establishing adequate safeguards to ensure that this growth supports those objectives. The FAO climate roadmap calls for at least 75% growth in global ‘sustainable aquaculture’ production by 2040 compared with 2020. Because FAO’s policies shape what governments, development banks, donors and businesses accept as sustainable, its target will influence aquatic food systems, food security, fishing livelihoods and the health of marine ecosystems for decades to come. This report finds that FAO is promoting aquaculture growth without guardrails. Its roadmap and subsequent Guidelines for Sustainable Aquaculture (GSA) fail to distinguish between fundamentally different production systems or constrain the expansion of feed-intensive and environmentally damaging forms of aquaculture. Crucial protections addressing nutrition and competition between aquafeed and human food were also removed from the guidelines. Without reform, FAO’s expansion agenda risks contradicting its founding mission by increasing pressure on wild fisheries, diverting nutritious fish away from people and exacerbating food insecurity, especially for the most vulnerable in Africa and Asia, who rely on small fish as an important source of nutrition. Aquaculture is the world’s fastest-growing food-production sector. It now produces more than half of the aquatic animals (fish, crustaceans, molluscs including cephalopods) consumed worldwide and is expected to drive most future growth in production. In 2024, the global trade value of farmed and wild-caught fish, algae, crustaceans and molluscs reached $183.1 billion. This was only about 1% below the combined $185.3 billion trade in beef, pork and chicken. In fact, aquatic foods represent a significant portion of the global food economy – approaching both global poultry and meat production in tonnes per year. But aquaculture is not a single production model. It ranges from non-fed and low-trophic systems, such as mussels, oysters and seaweed, which require few external inputs and can provide ecological benefits, to intensive farming of salmon, sea bass, sea bream and shrimp, which relies on manufactured feed containing wild-caught fish, soy and other agricultural commodities. These systems have fundamentally different implications for food security, climate, biodiversity and resource use. Although FAO acknowledges this diversity, its push for growth does not translate these differences into clear priorities governing which production systems should expand. While FAO says aquaculture expansion should be ‘sustainable’, neither its roadmap nor the GSA explains which species and production systems should deliver the additional production, how much feed and wild fish that growth could require or which forms of aquaculture should not expand. To map the potential consequences, Changing Markets worked with world-class fisheries scientists at the Institute for the Ocean and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia to model different pathways to FAO’s 2040 target. The results show that the outcome depends on which species expand and how they are fed. If recent trends continue, aquaculture’s demand for wild fish would rise by 85–88%, reaching the equivalent of 29–38% of the entire global wild catch recorded in 2020. If growth is concentrated in feed-intensive species, demand could more than double, requiring the equivalent of nearly half the world’s annual wild catch. By contrast, reducing the amount of fishmeal and fish oil used in feed, while directing more growth towards species that require little or no wild fish, could allow aquaculture production to grow while reducing aquaculture’s demand for whole wild fish by up to 16–17% below 2020 levels. Aquaculture’s hunger for fishmeal and fish oil has already grown dramatically. FAO data shows that its share of global fishmeal use rose from around 10% in 1980 to around 90% in 2024, while its share of fish-oil use increased from roughly 1% to 63%. Claims that the sector has grown without requiring more marine ingredients therefore obscure a fundamental shift: aquaculture has become the overwhelmingly dominant consumer of a finite supply, and under current growth patterns its absolute demand for wild fish is set to continue rising.
| Item Type: | Books |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | UN, Food Security, Aquaculture, Aquaculture Development, Guidelines for Sustainable Aquaculture (GSA), Vulnerable, Africa, Asia, FAO |
| Subjects: | Aquaculture |
| Depositing User: | IPL ADMIN |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Sep 2026 07:13 |
| Last Modified: | 07 Sep 2026 07:13 |
| URI: | http://icsfarchives.net/id/eprint/22647 |
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