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Diminishing returns on labour in the global marine food system

Nature Sustainability volume 7, pages 45–52 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Technological advances over the past century have greatly reduced the proportion of human labour required to produce the world’s food. On land, these advances have continually increased yields, feeding a growing human population even as the number of farmers has fallen. It has long been recognized that technological advances do not necessarily increase fishery yields in the same way; since the natural productivity of wild fish stocks puts a strong limit on capture fisheries, high labour inputs can lead to overfishing. However, the global evolution of labour in marine fisheries has not been assessed, leaving the overall interactions among technology, fishers and catches unknown. Here we reconstruct the global number of marine fishers from 1950 to 2015 and show that the total number of fishers grew with no sign of reversal despite mechanization, as large increases in lower- and middle-income countries overwhelmed an ~60% decrease in higher-income countries. As a result, the wild fish catch per fisher has declined since the 1990s despite major technological advances—a stark contrast to the 70% increase of the production per farmer over the same period. Our results show that, globally averaged, fisheries displayed diminishing—or even negative—returns on labour over 1950–2015, which has been detrimental for food production efficiency, marine ecosystems and fishing communities.

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Fig. 1: Reconstructed global fisheries employment 1950–2015.
Fig. 2: FF (%) of total working population by income group 1950–2015.
Fig. 3: Food production efficiency per fisher.
Fig. 4: Change in fisheries labour indicators over time by country.

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Data availability

The dataset produced and used in this study is available as Supplementary Data material and in the Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7215108. Original data files are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Code availability

The R-code used to produce, analyse and visualize the data in this study is available in the Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7215108.

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Acknowledgements

This work is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement 682602 (K.J.N.S. and E.D.G.), with partial support from the Norwegian Research Council, project 326896 (K.J.N.S.) and the Canada Research Chairs Program, award CRC-2020-00108 (E.D.G.). We thank R. Heneghan for statistical advice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain

    Kim J. N. Scherrer & Eric D. Galbraith

  2. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Kim J. N. Scherrer

  3. Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Yannick Rousseau

  4. FOME Lab, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Yannick Rousseau

  5. Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Lydia C. L. Teh & U. Rashid Sumaila

  6. School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    U. Rashid Sumaila

  7. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Eric D. Galbraith

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Contributions

K.J.N.S., E.D.G. and Y.R. conceptualized the study. K.J.N.S., E.D.G., Y.R. and L.C.L.T. developed the methodology. K.J.N.S performed the data collection and analysis. K.J.N.S. and E.D.G. did the visualization. K.J.N.S. wrote the original draft, and all co-authors contributed to writing the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Kim J. N. Scherrer.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Rögnvaldur Hannesson and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–13, Tables 1–5, Results and references.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data 1

Processed fisheries labour data.

Supplementary Data 2

Socioeconomic variables (mean over the available time period).

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Scherrer, K.J.N., Rousseau, Y., Teh, L.C.L. et al. Diminishing returns on labour in the global marine food system. Nat Sustain 7, 45–52 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01249-8

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