| Fish is an important component of a healthy diet. Elsewhere in Aquamedia, you can read about the nutritional aspects of fishery products. Europeans consume large amounts of seafood every year and the chart below shows the average consumption of fishery products (kg/head/year) in 1997 for many different countries. 
Source: The European Commission The figure above shows that Europeans generally consume more fishery products per capita than the rest of the world. The average European citizen consumed 23.4 kg. fishery products in 1997 - the world average being16.1 kg. Japan and Iceland top the statistics for the highest fish consumption, while the Spanish and the Portuguese are the highest in the European Union. The European's appetite for seafood also shows up in the EU's trade balance for fishery products, as the following figure shows. 
Source: The European Commission In 1999 the European Union had a trade deficit for fishery products of €8.1 billion . The graph shows that most EU countries were net-importers, but with widely differing degrees of deficit. The only countries with a positive trade balance were Denmark, The Netherlands and Ireland. To put this into perspective, it can also be noted that the Italian trade deficit on fishery products is larger that the combined surplus of Denmark, the Nethelands and Ireland. At a time when fish stocks in the seas surrounding Europe are at an all time low, the only opportunities for answering the ever-increasing demand for fishery products is either to increase the imports (and thereby exploit fish stocks somewhere else and increase trade deficits) or further the development of aquaculture. While aquaculture products currently represent the smaller part of the European consumption of fishery products, it is seen as being part of the solution for covering the world's need for protein and the European's fish and seafood requirement, not least because other opportunities are also constrained by severe environmental consequences.
The information for the European Union has been taken from 'Facts & figures on the CFP: Basic data on the Common Fisheries Policy' (published by the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities: ISBN 92-894-1842-7). The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has published several important reports on the State of Fisheries and Aquaculture on the global scale; links to these documents are provided on the right-hand pane. |
