With 90 per cent of the world’s wild ‘fish stocks’ fully-exploited, overexploited or depleted, aquaculture is on the rise – but don’t believe the pike, it’s all a load of pollocks.
Every year we kill in excess of two trillion wild fish globally, a number that is so hard to measure in singular terms that we refer to fish slaughter in weights – by the tonne, rather than the number of individuals. For a variety of reasons – including increased consumer demand for seafood, the rapid development of industrialised fishing and widespread plastic pollution – we have lost more than 50 per cent of our marine life in the last 50 years.