Seafood and Nutrition

Project Title: The Seafood Trade and Nutritional Access (preprint)

Panfried arctic char in Iceland, Europe

Macronutrients and micronutrients are essential for human health. It is estimated that nearly 2 billion people worldwide lack key micronutrients, underlying nearly half of all death in children under 5 years of age. Efforts to tackle malnutrition have shifted to focus on ensuring sufficient consumption of essential nutrients. Seafood is a major contributor to global food security and provides critical macronutrients (e.g., calories, protein, Fatty Acids (Omega-3)), and micronutrients (e.g., Iron, Zinc, Calcium, Selenium, Vitamin B-12). It contributes over 15% of total animal protein consumption globally. In developing nations, seafood can be one of the few accessible sources of key micronutrients and protein for certain groups. Recently, the impact of seafood trade on nutritional access has been questioned. Specifically, whether the seafood trade contributes to the rich importers taking nutrition-dense seafood away from the poor, and consequently exacerbating malnutrition among the poor, has raised debates among researchers and policy makers.

African scene. The first plane of a tray in the soil and many hands around it taking rice of his interior to eat.

The concern on nutritional insecurity due to globalization of seafood markets ignores the nutritional contributions of seafood that low-income nations import due to reciprocal trade. We utilize a novel dataset connecting country-level seafood trade flows to product-specific data on nutrient concentrations to investigate how seafood trade affects nutritional availability to residents of developing nations in terms of nutrient density per dollar.

In the first stage, we have constructed a comprehensive data set that links seafood commodities with its detailed nutrition content. We find compelling evidence across three macronutrients and nine micronutrients that developing nations pay lower prices for nutrition in imported seafood than developed nations. We demonstrate that import prices reflect values of nutritional characteristics but also premiums for freshness, particular species, convenient product forms such as fillets, and trophic level. We show that a significant portion of the nutritional bargain for low-income nations reflects differences in the non-nutritional characteristics of seafood imports between developed and developing nations.

In the first stage, we examined the discrepancies in prices paid for nutritious seafood between developed and developing. However, we did not examine the net supply of nutrients via seafood to each country. In the second stage (with additional funding), we will link the FAO production and trade data and estimate the seafood supply of each country. This allows us to assess the nutrition supply through seafood Utilizing the nutrition content from the first stage, we can then assess nutrition supply via seafood to each country as well as the nutrition flow along seafood trades. Given this, we can then test if seafood trade contributes to the rich importers taking nutrition-dense seafood away from the poor, and consequently exacerbating malnutrition among the poor at the country level.