Coastal Aquaculture and Mariculture

Unit 2 - Marine Fishery resources of the world

2.1. Overview of Marine Fishery resources
According to FAO, both Atlantic and Pacific oceans are considered fully fished and sees some prospects for increasing Indian Ocean fisheries as India has one of the longest coastlines in the world. They examined long term trend of 200 major fish resources representing 77% of the marine fish landings of the world and concluded that about 47 to 50% of the stocks are fully exploited. An estimate of 25 to 27% are under exploited or moderately exploited. Another 15 to 18% are over exploited and have no potential for further increase. The remaining 9 to 10% stocks have been depleted. Major fluctuations have been recorded for some individual species. High landings are dependent on one or two productive stocks such as Alaska Pollock and Japanese Anchovy in the North West Pacific, Atlantic herring in d1e North East Atlantic and skipjack and yellow fin tuna in the Western Central pacific. The over all trend depends on major tuna stocks and older categories of marine fish. If the factors influencing capture fisheries such as over fishing, by catch discard and other management measures are not resolved, pressure on capture fisheries will continue and decline in production is certain.
In general, the major fisheries of the world occur in two main areas, the areas of wide continental shelf and upwelling areas. The areas of upwelling include Peru, South Africa, North West Africa, California and south west coast of India.
The total world fish production from both capture and culture fisheries which was just 4 million tonnes in 1900, increased to about 60 mt in the late sixties, crossed 100 mt in the late eighties and increased to 116.7 mt in 1995 and reached 145.1 million tonnes in 2009. China remains by far the largest producer with a fisheries production of 49.5 mt in 2005. Of this, 107.2 mt of fish was used for food, providing a per capita supply of 16.6 kg, remaining 34.4 mt was destined for non-food uses, in particular the manufacture of fish meal and oil and direct feed for aquaculture.

World fisheries and aquaculture production and utilization (Source: FAO)