Collecting demographic data for the EU aquaculture sector: What can we learn?

Abstract

The EU aquaculture industry is a politically prioritized industry as shown in the EU's Farm to Fork Strategy. The political objectives include biological, economic and social sustainability of the industry. However, while a lot of attention has been paid to the economic importance and environmental impact from the aquaculture sector, there has been less focus on the social dimension. This paper contributes to the development of the social dimension by providing a baseline of the employment structure in the EU aquaculture sector. This is done by producing the first coherent overview of the employment in the sector presenting demographic information on gender, age, education and nationality. Data are further provided by country, by production technology, and by sector (marine, fresh water, shellfish). The results show that the sector is dominated by employees that are citizens of the same country as they are employed, are male, are between 40 and 64 years old, and have a low to medium level of education.

Keywords

Socio-demographic data; Social sustainability; Sustainable blue economy; EU aquaculture

Published in

Aquaculture
2022, Volume: 559, article number: 738382

SLU Authors

• Waldo, Staffan

  • Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG5 Gender equality
SDG8 Decent work and economic growth
SDG10 Reduced inequalities


UKÄ Subject classification

Fish and Aquacultural Science


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aquaculture.2022.738382

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/117316