Fishing industry by country

• 1. Introduction

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  In 2022, the world's fisheries produced more than 213 million tonnes of fish, crustaceans, molluscs, and aquatic plants combined. That number is almost impossible to picture in a single image. It represents the output of boats, ponds, sea cages, and river nets spread across every continent, feeding billions of people and anchoring national economies from the largest fishing nations down to the smallest island states.

  The fishing industry does not work the same way in every country. Some nations pull their catch almost entirely from wild waters. Others have built vast aquaculture operations that far outpace what their fleets could ever haul from the sea. The balance between these two approaches varies so widely that the global picture only makes sense when you look at it country by country.

  The numbers raise questions worth exploring. Which countries dominate total production? How large is the gap between wild capture and farmed fish? And what does the separate world of aquatic plant harvesting look like alongside the fish data?

• 2. The 2022 Catch in Numbers

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  The world's combined fisheries harvest in 2022 reached 213,618,123 tonnes. Of that total, aquaculture accounted for 126,935,293 tonnes, while wild capture brought in 87,988,166 tonnes. Farmed fish and seafood, in other words, now substantially outweighs what fishing vessels catch in open water.

  The leading country in total production recorded 88,567,716 tonnes, a figure that dwarfs every other nation on the list. Its aquaculture output alone stood at 75,388,639 tonnes, with capture adding another 13,179,077 tonnes. No other country comes close to that combined total.

  The second-ranked country reported 22,032,425 tonnes in total, with 14,633,869 tonnes from aquaculture and 7,398,555 tonnes from capture. The third-ranked country produced 15,774,325 tonnes, split between 10,235,300 tonnes of aquaculture and 5,539,025 tonnes from capture.

  Further down the table, the production figures fall sharply. The fourth-ranked country reported 8,760,378 tonnes total, followed closely by one at 5,509,031 tonnes. Several nations in the mid-range of the table reported totals between roughly one and five million tonnes, while a large number of countries produced only a few hundred thousand or tens of thousands of tonnes. At the far end of the table, some entries record totals as low as single-digit tonnes or even zero.

• 3. Capture Versus Aquaculture

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  Some countries in the 2022 data depend almost entirely on wild capture, with aquaculture contributing little or nothing to their total. One country listed 780,383 tonnes entirely from capture, with no aquaculture recorded at all. Another recorded 307,055 tonnes purely from wild fishing. A third showed 155,205 tonnes, again with zero aquaculture.

  On the other side of the ledger, some entries show aquaculture as the overwhelming driver. One country's total of 5,509,031 tonnes broke down as 140,931 tonnes from aquaculture and 5,368,101 tonnes from capture, illustrating that the relationship is not uniform. A country at 5,339,717 tonnes relied on 348,187 tonnes of aquaculture and 4,991,530 tonnes from wild catch.

  The figure of 1,592,954 tonnes for one country came almost entirely from capture, with aquaculture contributing just 2,310 tonnes. Another country with 1,497,393 total tonnes split the figure as 738,881 from aquaculture and 758,512 from capture, a near-even division that stands out among the predominantly lopsided breakdowns elsewhere in the table.

  At the smaller end of the scale, several countries show totals of a few thousand tonnes or fewer, sometimes with no recorded capture or no recorded aquaculture. The entry of a mere 1 tonne for some nations signals either very limited participation in commercial fisheries or incomplete reporting at the time of compilation.

• 4. Aquatic Plants: A Separate Harvest

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  Alongside the fish and shellfish data, the 2022 table sits next to a separate record for aquatic plants, drawn from 2005 figures. The world total for aquatic plant harvesting in 2005 reached 16,095,775 tonnes. Aquaculture drove the vast majority of that figure, contributing 14,789,972 tonnes, while capture added 1,305,803 tonnes.

  The leading producer of aquatic plants in 2005 recorded 11,163,675 tonnes in total, with 10,855,295 tonnes farmed and 308,380 tonnes captured wild. The second country on that list produced 1,338,895 tonnes, almost entirely from aquaculture at 1,338,597 tonnes, with capture supplying a negligible 298 tonnes.

  The third-ranked country contributed 918,366 tonnes, followed by one at 636,366 tonnes and another at 612,635 tonnes. An "Other" category in the plant table accounted for 556,200 tonnes in total, of which 96,761 tonnes came from aquaculture and 459,439 tonnes from capture. The aquatic plant table excludes countries whose total harvest fell below 100,000 tonnes, meaning the global total understates participation by smaller producers.

• 5. Scale, Range, and What the Numbers Show

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  The breadth of the country-by-country data reveals how unevenly fishing capacity is distributed around the world. A handful of nations produce tens of millions of tonnes, while scores of others report figures in the thousands or even single digits. The ratio between the highest and lowest producers in the 2022 table spans many orders of magnitude.

  The split between capture and aquaculture within individual countries tells a different story from the global aggregate. Globally, farmed output exceeds wild catch. Within many individual countries, the reverse holds true, and some of the largest capture-only totals belong to countries that have built no measurable aquaculture sector at all.

  The world total of 87,988,166 tonnes from wild capture in 2022, set against the 126,935,293 tonnes from aquaculture, means that farmed seafood accounts for roughly 59 percent of the combined global fish harvest when plants are excluded from the count. That shift in the balance between wild and farmed production is one of the more concrete facts the data makes visible, and it points toward a global food system in which aquaculture's share has grown large enough to outpace what fleets working open water are able to bring in.