The Aquaculture in the World, Europe and Hungary

Ózsvári, László – Máté, Marietta

Keywords: aquatic animal production, aquaculture, capture fishery, fish production, fish consumption, Q17, Q22

In the last seven decades, the growth of aquatic animal production was the largest within the entire livestock sector, its annual growth rate even exceeded that of the poultry sector, and it played a very important role in fulfilling the population’s demand for animal protein in the developing countries. The global aquatic animal production continuously increased from 19.3 million tons in 1950 to 178.6 million tons in 2018, practically nine fold. From the mid-1980s, the expansion of global production was driven by the development of the aquaculture sector (especially in Asia, of which China) and 87.6% (156.4 million tons) of the total capture fisheries and aquaculture production were used for human consumption, the average annual fish consumption was 20.2 kg/capita worldwide in 2018. The annual gross fish production in Hungary was 25-30 thousand tons in the last 20 years and the import value of fish and fishery products more than four times exceeded that of the Hungarian export, which mainly consisted of live commercial fish. The Hungarian fish consumption (6.8 kg per capita) is moderately rising but still the smallest within the European Union whose average value was 23.1 kg/capita in 2018.


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