Throughout the Asia-Pacific region, captured and cultured marine fisheries continue to play an important role in the food security, poverty alleviation and economies of many countries. Marine fisheries resources have been largely overexploited, and as a result, development of coastal aquaculture has been encouraged to provide the needed protein, income, employment, and export earnings for some countries. Such a policy trend implies, however, that sufficient food for cultured marine fisheries will be available. Inevitably, a dangerous spiral has evolved where the demand for low value/trash fish has supported increased fishing pressure on already degraded resources. This raises some important questions regarding the social, economic and ecological costs and benefits of this system, its sustainability and future trends.

With increasing uncertainty in the capture and availability of fish all year round in local communities in Ghana, sale and utilisation of trash fish provides a strategy to combat hunger, inadequate nutrition, poverty and a guarantee for improved liveli-hoods. However, the sizeable number of species exploited and the observed high pressure on fish stocks provides enough concern to both scientists and managers to contribute to instituting pragmatic and dynamic measures and policies to control this growing business. It is expected that such control of the trash fish trade will include adequate scientific collection of data on trash fish and discards that would contribute to efficient estimation of Ghana’s contribution to global estimation of by-catch and discards.