Aquaculture crossed 100 million tonnes of production for the first time in 2024. That's the headline from the FAO's State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report, released every two years as the closest thing the seafood industry has to a global report card. But the milestone number isn't the most useful part of this report. The more useful part is where that growth is concentrated, and where it isn't.
The big picture: farms are carrying the growth, fisheries aren't
Global fisheries and aquaculture production reached 235 million tonnes in 2024, up roughly 5 percent from two years earlier. Of that total, 103 million tonnes came from farmed aquatic animals, crossing the symbolic 100-million-tonne mark for the first time. Add algae production and aquaculture's total climbs to 141 million tonnes, worth close to $391 billion.
Wild capture tells a different story. Capture fisheries produced about 92 million tonnes in 2024, a level that's stayed within a narrow 86 to 94 million tonne band since the late 1980s. Wild catch isn't declining, but it isn't growing either. Nearly every additional tonne of seafood supply over the last three and a half decades has come from farms, not the ocean. Aquaculture now accounts for 53 percent of global aquatic animal production and more than 59 percent of what people actually eat.
Where the growth is: Asia, and increasingly Africa
Asia produced 70 percent of the world's aquatic animals in 2022, and the region's dominance in aquaculture specifically is even sharper: 91.4 percent of global aquaculture production that year was Asian. Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe followed at a distant 3.3 and 2.7 percent, with Africa at 1.9 percent, North America at 0.5 percent, and Oceania at 0.2 percent. China alone accounts for the largest single share of farmed output, with India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh rounding out the next tier of major producers.
That concentration means the well-known farming operations in Norway, Scotland, or Canada, while technically sophisticated, represent a small fraction of global volume. The growth story is happening in Asian pond and cage systems, and increasingly in Africa, which is expanding aquaculture faster than any other region even though its total output remains a small share of the global figure.
Consumption tells a related but separate story. Global per-capita aquatic food supply rose from 21.1 kg in 2023 to an estimated 21.3 kg in 2024. But that average hides a wide gap: Asia's per-capita supply sits at 26.3 kg, while Africa's is 9.1 kg. Sub-Saharan Africa's aquaculture sector did post real gains in 2024, adding roughly 105,000 tonnes of production, but the region is still growing from a small base relative to Asia's scale. Production is rising globally. Access to it is not rising evenly.
What the next decade looks like
The OECD and FAO's joint Agricultural Outlook projects total aquatic animal production will grow from about 193 million tonnes in the 2022-2024 base period to roughly 212 million tonnes by 2034. Aquaculture is expected to supply around 118 million tonnes of that total, or 56 percent, up from 52 percent in the base period.
That growth rate is slower than the previous decade's, and the Outlook is specific about why: stricter environmental regulations in many producing countries and a shrinking supply of suitable new farm sites are both capping how fast aquaculture can expand. Asia is expected to remain the center of gravity, projected to hold 88 percent of global aquaculture output by 2034, though its growth rate is slowing as countries like India and Vietnam pick up a larger share of new production relative to a maturing Chinese sector.
By species, the fastest-growing categories through 2034 are shrimp and prawns (+38 percent), freshwater and diadromous fish excluding carp and tilapia (+29 percent), and salmonids (+26 percent). Capture fisheries are projected to stay essentially flat, inching up to around 94 million tonnes with little structural change expected. Global per-capita consumption is projected to reach 21.8 kg by 2034, but the report specifically flags that Africa's per-capita consumption could decline over that period, since population growth there is expected to outpace supply growth.
Why this matters beyond the numbers
The patterns in this report don't stay contained to the regions where they happen. When aquaculture output grows in Asia, it changes global demand for fishmeal, fish oil, and the grain and oilseed inputs that increasingly substitute for them. When per-capita consumption rises in a developing market, that shows up in shipping capacity, cold chain investment, and competition for the same raw materials that feed farms elsewhere. When a fishery closure or climate event hits one part of the world, feed markets and farming operations thousands of miles away feel the effect within a season, not a decade.
It's easy for companies in established markets to spend most of their attention on Norway, Scotland, Chile, or the eastern seaboard of North America. The FAO's numbers are a reminder that a shrinking share of the industry's future growth sits in those places. The regions producing the volume today, and the regions expected to produce more of it by 2034, aren't where most Western aquaculture coverage tends to focus.
That has practical implications for anyone trying to plan around feed costs, sourcing, or market access. If Asian aquaculture keeps expanding at its current pace, feed ingredient demand keeps climbing with it, and that pressure shows up in fishmeal and fish oil markets globally, not just regionally. If African aquaculture keeps growing off a small base while consumption there struggles to keep pace with population growth, the investment and infrastructure gap in that region becomes a bigger story over the next decade, not a smaller one.
The report's underlying message is that seafood is a connected system, not a set of separate regional markets. Decisions made by companies, regulators, and investors in any one region increasingly ripple into all the others. Planning for where the industry is actually heading, rather than where it has historically been concentrated, is going to matter more with each edition of this report, not less.
