Home News Portugal consumes much more fish than the rest of the world, but the future must involve aquaculture

Portugal consumes much more fish than the rest of the world, but the future must involve aquaculture

Carolina Rico

According to FAO, “Portugal has an average consumption of much higher than the world average” of seafood products. It is not possible to increase fishing quotas, so aquaculture is the best solution to continue eating fish “with a clear conscience.

Audun Lem, Deputy Director of FAO’s Division for Policies and Economics of Fisheries and Aquaculture© TSF

Baked sardines, fried mackerel, or 365 ways to cook cod. Portugal is one of the largest consumers of fish in the world, but to ensure that it remains so in the future we must invest more and more in aquaculture, argues Audun Lem, deputy director of the Division of Policies and Economics of Fisheries and Aquaculture of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

In an interview with TSF on the sidelines of the Oceans Conference in Lisbon, Audun Lem explains that one of FAO’s main concerns is to “ensure that fishermen and people linked to the fisheries and agriculture sector can continue to develop their activities and in a sustainable way to ensure that they remain available for future generations.

To this end, it is important to meet the catch quotas, already in place, which determine how much fish can be caught on the high seas during a given period.

“In the short term the biggest challenge in Portugal, as anywhere in the world, is to ensure that the capacity to fish is in line with the available resources and to ensure that science the data is used to determine the amount of catch that can be made to avoid overfishing”.

Read more at: TSF

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