Aquaculture: A Dark Horse in the Race to Feed the World

Farmed or wild-caught? That is the question.

by Carmen Hoyt

Fri, Sep 05, 2025

There are plenty of fish in the sea… or so they say.

As the global population continues to climb, fisheries face an increasing pressure to keep up with the demand for protein. Today, over 3 billion people depend on seafood as their primary source of animal protein, with some coastal regions relying on it for more than half their intake ¹.

While improved management has helped to maintain wild fisheries, a new front-runner has emerged in the race to feed the world: aquaculture. However, the road has been anything but clear. Early on, aquaculture (particularly for shrimp), had a reputation of disease, pollution, and habitat distruction. With advancements in technology and technique, the industry has made giant strides towards improvement and shows no signs of slowing down.

For the first time in history, aquaculture exceeded capture fisheries to provide more than half of the world’s seafood in 2022 ². This is no surprise, considering the industry grew more than 5x between 1990 and 2018 ¹. Despite reaching new production highs, global aquaculture is primarily centered around a few key species, including tilapia, oysters, shrimp, and clams ¹, while smaller operations see a range in species diversity.

In the Ocean Health Index (OHI) framework, aquaculture is incorporated as mariculture, or the rearing of organisms in a marine environment. This can look like ponds or facilities along the coast or cages in the open ocean. Mariculture manifests in two OHI goals: food provision and livelihoods and economies.

In food provision, mariculture is a subgoal that assesses our ability to sustainably maximize farm-raised marine food production ³. The OHI approach measures regions against their own potential, considering actual production against each individual production potential, based off suitable area (assuming all other inputs, such as labor and infrastructure, are given). Suitable area is modeled to account for biological, economic, and social constraints. Individual species sustainability is then taken into consideration using data obtained from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program.

Ultimately, species sustainability can be defined in many ways. As National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) director Ben Halpern puts it, farmed shellfish (clams, mussels, oysters, and scallops) and seaweeds are some of the most sustainable options for many reasons, a few being pollution remediation, carbon sequestration, and habitat creation. As filter-feeders, shellfish obtain their food from the water, effectively utilizing excessive nutrients that could otherwise be harmful to the environment (i.e. fertizlizer runoff) and requiring no input of food. Additionally, they use carbon in the water column to build their shells, which in turn can provide habitat for other organisms and support entire ecosystems. To hear more about Ben’s work, check out this Ologies podcast!

There are three components to the livelihoods and economies goal: job quantity, job quality, and revenue. Job quantity (number of people employed in the sector) and job quality (average wage) are combined to calculate livelihoods. Revenue, on the other hand, represents the economies portion of the goal. Mariculture is one of the sectors considered, though data regarding job quality remains sparse. However, its inclusion in this goal represents its importance as a global industry, especially as its growth trajectory shows no signs of slowing down.

So, next time you are at the grocery store, take a closer look at the labels on your seafood. It might be time to trade imported fish fillets for guilt-free farmed shellfish or seaweed!

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