4.3.3—Increasing demand

Aquatic-food demand rises through two separate levers: number of consumers and amount consumed per person.

Population, income, urbanization, nutrition preferences and cold-chain trade can change the two levers differently. Consumption is not the same graph as wild catch because aquaculture may fill demand.

Local textbook evidence shows sustained global growth in fish and seafood consumption from 1961 to 2018. Per-person consumption rose by about 34–44% in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and South Korea and by nearly 74% in the Maldives; population growth then multiplies those per-person changes into still larger total demand.

Farmed production can expand while capture fisheries remain constrained.

Do not infer wild-stock recovery from a flat catch graph; supply may have shifted to aquaculture.