Global nutritional equity of fishmeal and aquaculture trade flows

This repository contains the code and figures for the main analysis conducted in support of the following paper:

Laura G. Elsler, Jessica A. Gephart, Jessica Zamborain-Mason, Tim Cashion, Max Troell, Rosamond Naylor, Rahul Agrawal Bejarano, and Christopher Golden. "Global nutritional equity of fishmeal and aquaculture trade flows”, accepted for publication as a Research Report in PNAS.

The repository is organized using the following structure:

    code - A folder containing the code used to analyze the processed data and prepare tables/figures
    figures - A folder containing the figures included in the article

J.A.G. and C.D.G. were supported by National Science Foundation grants 1826668 and 2121238, C.D.G. was supported by the John and Katie Hansen Family Foundation, and JAG received additional funding from the Kenneth K. Chew Endowed Professorship in Aquaculture.

Data references:

1. Aquatic Food Composition Database (AFCD): C. D. Golden, et al., “Aquatic Food Composition Database”. AFCD. Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KI0NYM. Accessed: 07/08/2025
2. Aquatic Resource Trade in Species database (ARTIS): J. Gephart, R. Agrawal Bejarano, ”Globalization of wild capture and farmed aquatic foods”. ARTIS, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10034319. Accessed: 12/01/2024
3. FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Production data: FAO, “Fishery and Aquaculture Statistics. Global production by production source 1950-2021 (FishStatJ).” FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Division, 2023. Accessed: 10/01/2023
4. Inadequate intake data: S. Passarelli, et al., Global estimation of dietary micronutrient inadequacies: a modelling analysis. The Lancet Global Health 12, e1590–e1599 (2024).
5. Blue Food Assessment Feed Conversion Ratios: J. A. Gephart, et al., Environmental performance of blue foods. Nature 597, 360–365 (2021).
6. Aquamodelr Feed Conversion Ratio and On-feed Proportion data: T. Cashion, “Aquamodelr package. Modelling Aquaculture Feed Use Globally”. GitHub. https://github.com/timcashion/aquamodelr/tree/master. Accessed: 12/01/2023

CODE DESCRIPTION

    0_ms_clean.R - For formatting and basic cleaning of all data
    1_ms_fm_cons_estimate.R - For estimating fishmeal consumption
    2_ms_matching_file.R - For matching trade and nutrient data 
Code to generate figures and results:
    3_ms_global.R - For computing global aquaculture production and nutrients in traded fishmeal and farmed fish
    4_ms_inequity.R - For assessing domestic use and trade flows in relation to country nutritional vulnerability
    5_ms_species.R - For species-specific nutrient flow analysis 
    6_ms_retention.R - For calculating the nutritional benefits of fishmeal and farmed fish retention scenarios