The global seafood map

Just how big is China?

By Culinate staff

July 5, 2011

For a nifty visual representation of the planet’s aquaculture industry, check out this map of the world. On the map, the Americas, Africa, and Europe are scrawny skeletons, but Asia looms large, and China (as in so many other areas of industry these days) dominates the entire map.

The map comes from a WorldFish Center report titled "Blue Frontiers: Managing the environmental costs of aquaculture." As Daniel Fromson noted on the Atlantic’s website, China’s current supremacy in fish farming is reason for concern:

China accounted for 61.5 percent of global aquaculture in 2008, a fact that has profound implications for the rest of the world in terms of food safety. When we deal with fish from China, we can’t be sure the fish is free of a host of risky antibiotics and other chemicals — and in the U.S., at least, the government isn’t adequately prepared to check.