At the 2024 G20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) agreed on a roadmap to support global fishing until 2030. The plan, called the Blue Transformation Roadmap, aims to make the world’s fisheries more sustainable to the benefit of both consumers and aquatic wildlife.
The Importance of Fishing
As with other food and agriculture industries, fishing has a lot more at stake than routine business operations. Fisheries supply fresh produce for markets all over the globe, providing a valuable source of protein and omega-3 fatty acids to local populations.
It’s also culturally significant, with many civilians around the world dependent on catching their own fish for food or leisure, and more casual anglers often spending their vacations going on fishing trips. Fishing is thereby heavily represented in international art and media, from paintings and poems to TV shows and online slot games. In the latter example, casinos on the internet use special settings and themes to make their slots more varied and interesting, and much of the iconography involved in fishing is so rich and recognizable that fish-themed slots like Fishin’ Frenzy have become among the games’ most popular variants.
So, owing to its widespread impact on and off our plates, even those who have never fished before will probably know the basics of fishing and could list off a few staple species which are consumed all over the world.
The Blue Transformation
With fishing being so economically, culturally, and environmentally important, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has devised a roadmap for the industry’s sustainable development. They first unveiled this plan in 2022, calling it the Blue Transformation.
The United Nations estimates that the world population will reach 10 billion by 2050. With that in mind, the Blue Transformation aims to support the growth of the fishing industry while lessening its environmental impacts. It also plans to address nutritional blind spots in some areas, which are typically developing nations. If successful, the result would be a more productive, efficient, and nutritionally beneficial fishing industry that can also boast long-term food security by conserving aquatic environments.
So, when the G20 gathered for their 2024 summit in Brazil, the FAO’s Director-General Qu Dongyu was also in attendance. There, the G20’s own Agriculture Working Group (AWG) produced a Ministerial Declaration greenlighting the FAO’s Blue Transformation Roadmap. That roadmap spans 2022 (when the Blue Transformation was conceived) to 2030. It joins a laundry list of other high-profile commitments that world governments have made to reinvigorate certain industries by or before 2030.
The Agriculture Working Group’s declaration spanned a lot more than just the roadmap, like tailored guidelines for smaller fisheries and other, more specialized strategies agreed upon by the FAO and the AWG. A month before the FAO Blue Transformation was accepted, British Farming Minister Daniel Zeichner had already met with G20 agriculture ministers to suggest further trade collaboration “to create sustainable agri-food systems.” Further details about the agreement have been published by Defra (the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs).
In light of these agreements, it’s clear that the conversation about global fishing security, sustainability, and collaboration is picking up. In the lead-up to 2030, we can expect to see more national and non-profit organizations committing to these goals. Since current Blue Transformation plans expire at the end of this decade, there’s no doubt that thought leaders and industry titans are strategizing on what a thriving fishing industry will look like in the 2030s and beyond.