Aquaculture and Food Security: Welfare Within a Global Challenge

Aquaculture provides essential nutrition to billions of people worldwide. Pursuing welfare improvements within food security constraints requires pragmatic, evidence-based approaches.

Key Facts

Aquaculture provides over 50% of fish consumed globally and is growing to meet increasing demand from a growing population.
Low-income and lower-middle-income countries rely disproportionately on aquaculture for affordable animal protein.
Tilapia, carp, and catfish are the dominant species in developing world aquaculture; they receive far less welfare research attention than salmon.
Small-scale aquaculture in Southeast Asia and Africa supports millions of livelihoods and provides affordable nutrition to communities.
Welfare standards are often presented as trade-offs with productivity and cost in developing world aquaculture contexts.
Evidence increasingly suggests that welfare improvements (reduced crowding, better water quality) improve growth and reduce disease, supporting sustainability.
FAO has published guidelines on aquaculture welfare that acknowledge different contexts while encouraging progressive improvement.
The welfare-sustainability alignment in aquaculture means that improvements benefit producers, consumers, and animals simultaneously in many cases.

Welfare Considerations

Aquaculture welfare must be pursued within the context of genuine food security challenges. For millions of people in low- and middle-income countries, farmed fish are a primary source of affordable protein; welfare standards that dramatically increase production costs risk reducing accessibility. A pragmatic approach acknowledges this context while still pursuing welfare improvement: focusing on interventions that are low-cost and high-impact (water quality management, stocking density optimisation, humane slaughter where technically feasible), supporting research into welfare-productivity alignment that makes the economic case for improvement, and developing welfare standards appropriate to different production scales and contexts. Universal welfare is the goal; universally identical welfare standards may not be the appropriate path to it.

What You Can Do

Support FAO and international aquaculture development organisations in integrating welfare into their technical programmes.
Engage with aquaculture welfare research that is relevant to developing world production contexts.
Avoid framing welfare as a luxury incompatible with food security — advocate for welfare-productivity evidence instead.
Support organisations working on context-appropriate welfare improvements in small-scale aquaculture.
Consider the food security context when evaluating aquaculture welfare standards and their implementation.
Support development assistance programmes that include welfare alongside productivity and sustainability in aquaculture.