Role of anchovies and sardines as reduction fisheries in the world fish meal production: Overview of the interaction between the resource and environmental and socioeconomic drivers

Abstract

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines reduction fisheries as fisheries that are geared towards the reduction of the catch to fishmeal and/or fish oil. These fisheries are relatively recent. Excess of seasonal catches of herring and sardines started to be processed in northern Europe and North America at the beginning of the 19th century to obtain fish oil to produce non-food products such as soap and lubricants for machinery. Once the benefit of fishmeal as an inexpensive food supplement for animal feeds was realized, their demand increased. Fisheries began to target anchovies and sardines worldwide, among other clupeoids, for reduction into fishmeal, fish oil being its by-product. After the 1950‘s, huge reduction fisheries and fishmeal production factories were developed in several countries such as the US, Norway, Peru, Japan (Watson et al. 2006). In the late 1980‘s, the global production of marine fish dedicated to produce fishmeal and oil peaked at more than 30 mt according to FAO estimates, which has remained relatively stable until the last years, and can be generally considered as the maximum catch that reduction fisheries can sustainably extract from the global oceans. Therefore, the amount of raw material to produce fishmeal is limited by marine ecosystems’ productivity and their capacity to sustain small pelagic fisheries. However, according to global databases (Fig. 7.1), overall small pelagic fisheries production has declined moderately since 2000. The conversion ratio of live fish into fishmeal has been reduced, enabling production of fishmeal to be maintained despite the decline of total small pelagic fisheries production. However, further increases of fishmeal and oil production are unlikely unless other species are used as raw material (Watson et al. 2006). Further comments on the historic development of reduction fisheries, their fishing methods, reduction process and a brief description of the ecological relevance of small pelagic fish are presented here.