The Food and Agriculture Organization released its 2026 update of world fisheries and aquaculture production in March, covering every year from 1950 to 2024. The headline number for 2024 is 234,841,529 tonnes of aquatic life taken from the water worldwide. Only 93,234,495 tonnes of it was caught. The other 141,607,034 tonnes, 60.3 percent of the total, was farmed.
Fish farming overtook fishing in 2013
This is not a new crossover. In 2013, farmed output reached 95,130,679 tonnes against a wild catch of 91,051,455 tonnes, and it has stayed ahead every year since. Wild catch has barely moved in that time: 88,311,752 tonnes in 2010, 90,678,252 tonnes in 2020, 93,234,495 tonnes in 2024. Aquaculture went from 78,213,171 tonnes to 141,607,034 tonnes over the same fourteen years.
Counting only animals, and leaving the seaweeds out, the two sides are much closer: 102,674,683 tonnes farmed against 91,930,639 tonnes caught in 2024.
Three of the four largest farmed species are seaweeds
The most farmed aquatic species of 2024 are not fish at all. Japanese kelp leads on 13,746,592 tonnes, followed by Gracilaria seaweeds on 7,854,493 tonnes and Cottoni seaweed on 7,723,467 tonnes. The first animal on the list is the whiteleg shrimp at 7,656,263 tonnes. Carps take six of the fifteen places.
Algae add up to 38,932,352 tonnes, 27.5 percent of everything farmed in water and 16.6 percent of all aquatic production. Almost none of it is gathered from the wild: wild harvesting of algae came to just 1,303,856 tonnes.
Two countries grow nearly all the seaweed
Seaweed farming is the most concentrated part of the sector. China harvested 24,391,407 tonnes and Indonesia 9,853,604 tonnes, which is 88.0 percent of the world total between the two of them. Seventy countries and territories farm algae at all, and the fifth-largest producer, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, harvested 603,000 tonnes, about 2.5 percent of China.
China leads the whole of aquaculture by country as well, with 81,949,673 tonnes, more than every other country put together. Indonesia and India follow on 15,754,684 and 12,094,195 tonnes.
What is still caught, and where
On the wild side the ranking looks nothing like a fish counter. The most caught wild species is the anchoveta at 5,037,454 tonnes. Skipjack tuna follows on 3,575,354 tonnes and Alaska pollock on 3,573,446 tonnes.
That top spot belongs almost entirely to two countries. Every tonne of anchoveta reported for 2024 came out of one fishing area, the Southeast Pacific, and Peru landed 4,731,955 tonnes of it against 305,499 tonnes for Chile. A single stock in a single stretch of ocean therefore supplies 5.4 percent of the world catch, which is why a poor anchoveta season shows up in the global total.
By fishing area, the Northwest Pacific alone produced 19,067,991 tonnes, 20.5 percent of the world catch. Inland waters matter more than they look: rivers and lakes in Asia and Africa together gave 11,442,460 tonnes, more than any single Atlantic area.
The two halves of the sector are also built differently. Countries reported wild catches of 3137 separate species items in 2024 but farmed only 524, and the fifteen biggest wild species make up 28.8 percent of the catch while the fifteen biggest farmed ones make up 59.6 percent of farmed output. Fishing takes whatever the sea holds; farming concentrates on a short list of species that grow predictably.
How solid are these numbers
FAO collects them through annual questionnaires sent to national fishery offices, and estimates a country when its return does not arrive in time. Of the 2024 aquaculture tonnage, 96.0 percent is flagged as an official national figure; on the capture side it is 79.2 percent, with the rest estimated or imputed. Discards thrown back at sea are not counted at all, so the wild figures describe what was landed, not what was killed.
| World aquatic production 2024 | Tonnes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Farmed (aquaculture) | 141,607,034 t | 60.3% |
| Wild catch | 93,234,495 t | 39.7% |
| of which seaweed and algae (farmed) | 38,932,352 t | 16.6% |
| World total | 234,841,529 t | 100% |
All five charts in this article come from the same FAO release, and each one lists its own limits: aquaculture by country, most farmed species, most caught wild species, fishing areas by catch and seaweed farming by country.