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Brugère, C.; Ridler, N.
Global aquaculture outlook
in the next decades: an analysis of national aquaculture production forecasts to
2030.
FAO Fisheries Circular. No. 1001. Rome, FAO. 2004.
47p.
ABSTRACT
Aquaculture production is expected to play a crucial role in
forthcoming decades in compensating for stagnant capture fisheries and in
meeting increased demand for aquatic products. Designed to ascertain the
compatibility of national aquaculture production forecasts with the global
prevision of the sector's growth to 2020 and beyond, the report attempts to
answer three questions:
1) Do individual countries have the ambition to expand their
aquaculture sector to meet global demand forecasts, and are their projections
realistic?
2) Is the "sum" of national production forecasts compatible
with global projections of anticipated requirements from the aquaculture
sector?
3) What planning lessons can be learnt from examining
individual country plans, and how could the process of aquaculture planning be
improved?
Three global forecasts (Delgado et al., 2003;
Wijkström, 2003; Ye, 1999) were used as a benchmark against which
countries’ ambitions were assessed through an analysis of the contents of
their national aquaculture development plans.
Results showed that the countries studied do wish to expand
their aquaculture output and, with some exceptions, their assumptions were
realistic as most governments appeared to endorse the sector’s growth.
Aggregation quantitative production targets from the national plans indicated
that global forecasts may have underestimated the future supply of fish food
coming from aquaculture. The future expansion of Chinese aquaculture remains
critical but using a modest 2 percent annual growth rate and without increases
in food fish output from capture fisheries, results suggested that most of the
demand projections for fish would be met in three forthcoming decades. Thus,
aggregated country productions from aquaculture are expected to grow at an
average annual growth rate of 4.5 percent over the period 2010 - 2030. In terms
of planning, appraisal of plans and strategies revealed a generally weak
planning process as methodologies and procedures tended to be sketchily
reported. A planning framework with issues to address is suggested with the
back-up of a consensus-building technique such as the Delphi method to improve
the quality of future plans and enable an evaluation of their likelihood of
success, as transparency, legitimacy and agreement are key to the success of a
plan.
Keywords:
Aquaculture, production forecasts, demand, national plans,
sector planning, global outlook. |
