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Aquaculture is expanding more quickly than any other food industry. The FAO reports that since 1970, aquaculture has grown 8.8% per year, while capture fishing has only increased by 1.2 % (2007). Developing countries actually account for 91.4% of aquaculture production, and China is supposedly the producer of 70% of aquacultured fish worldwide. In China, inland water aquaculture has grown 10.8% in the same period, and marine aquaculture grew 10.7%. Regarding capture fisheries, China has about 8.5 million fishermen, 13 million total fishermen and fish farmers (31% of world's total). It can come as no surprise that since 2002, China has been the world's top exporter of fish. In 2004 China's fish export reached a value of $6.6 billion, which is an 11% increase since 1994. Some of China's exportation is accounted for by the fact that much of it's industry involves transforming unprocessed raw goods into final products to be be re-exported, largely because of its low labor costs. China has also increased its percentage of imports. The value of these imports rose from $0.2 billion in 1990 to $3.1 billion in 2004. This recent increase was caused primarily by China's joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 requiring it to lower it's average tariff from 15.3% in 2001 to 10.4% in 2004 (FAO, 2007).
Fisheries Sector Growth
In the past three decades, global employment in aquaculture and fisheries has grown faster than employment in traditional agriculture, causing the number of people involved in this industry to grow at a faster rate than the population of the planet. It is still a very small portion of the overall food production sector; in 1990 2.3% percent of global agriculture was fishing and aquaculture, a percentage that has now swelled to 3.1%. This is a 35% growth, which occurs mostly in Asia where most fishermen and aquaculture are (FAO, 2007).
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