The 2018 Economic Report of the EU Aquaculture Sector provides a comprehensive overview of the latest information available on the production, economic value, structure and competitive performance of the sector at the national as well as the EU level for the years 2008 to 2016. The current report replaces previous aquaculture reports.

In this report, a special effort has been made to present the development of the entire EU aquaculture sector from 2008 to 2016. The totals and the time trends presented in chapter 2 of this report are based on the data collected under DCF and EU-MAP, supplemented with EUROSTAT and FAO data, estimating missing values to be able to give a comprehensive overview of the EU aquaculture sector.

Overall, the performance of the aquaculture sector is improving. The EU aquaculture sector reached 1.4 million tonnes in sales volume and €4.9 billion in sales value, in 2016. This corresponds to an increase of 6% in sales volume and 8% in the sales value compared to 2014. The economic performance of the EU aquaculture sector has been improving on almost all economic indicators in 2016 compared to 2014 and 2015. This positive economic development is seen for all the three sub-segments; Marine fishes, freshwater fishes and shellfish, which are all providing positive economic growth and generating positive profits.

Additionally, a special chapter on the Multiannual National Strategic Plans is provided assessing to what extend measures and actions described therein have been or are being implemented. Furthermore, the experts tried to evaluate if the objectives for growth in the national plans was likely to be achieved by the ending of the current funding period 2020-2023.

Finally, the EWG compared variables reported under the DCF and the EU-MAP due to the fact that this data call covered both programs with different data requirements.

The EWG were able to adequately address all subject related to the TOR including a comparison of the reported variables under DCF and EU-MAP and writing a special chapter on the current status for the Multiannual National Strategic Plans concerning the implementation of action and measures and whether the objective for growth in the EU is likely to be achieved.

This report was originally published by the European Commission here.