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Employment in Fisheries and Aquaculture: FAO Data

Source: R/fao_employment.R
load_fao_employment.Rd

This function returns the FAO statistics of the number of people employed in the primary sector of fisheries and aquaculture ("Global employment in the primary sector of fisheries and aquaculture", FI_Employment), by country, work area, working time, sex and year, from 1995, with FAO's notes on individual countries.

Usage

load_fao_employment(version = "latest", data_dir = fao_data_dir())

Arguments

version

The release, e.g. "2026.1.0". Default is "latest".

data_dir

The directory where the data is saved. Default is fao_data_dir().

Value

A data frame with one row per country, work area, working time, sex and year: Country..Name. (as in load_fao_data()), Work.area..Code. (A, C, D, I, M or U), Work.area, Working.time, Sex, Year, Number (people) and Number.Type ("actual", "estimate", ...). The attribute country_notes is a data frame of FAO's notes on individual countries (country_en, note), and fao_version and source_url give the release.

What the data are

FAO collects the data from countries with an annual questionnaire (jointly with the OECD for 53 countries) and estimates the figures of countries that do not report (FAO metadata of release 2026.1.0; FAO first disseminated this dataset in 2026):

  • 223 countries, 1995-2024; 65.4 million people in 2024 (SOFIA 2026 gives 65.3 million).

  • Work areas: aquaculture, marine coastal fishing, marine deep-sea fishing, marine fishing not specified (NEI), inland waters fishing, and "Unspecified" (9 percent of the people in 2024). Processing and subsistence are not published, their coverage being too small.

  • Working time, as defined by the Coordinating Working Party on Fishery Statistics (CWP): full time (at least 90 percent of working time or livelihood), part time (30 to 90 percent), occasional (less than 30 percent), or unspecified.

  • The numbers are people, not full-time equivalents: an occasional worker counts as one.

  • Working time is unspecified for 38 percent and sex for 41 percent of the data (FAO metadata); FAO's imputations make up about 30 percent of the data and half of the people in 2024. Number.Type "estimate" marks them and the estimates of countries.

  • National definitions differ, and the level of detail can change over the years; read the notes of each country (the attribute country_notes, also shown by employment_summary() and catch_per_fisher()). For example, FAO notes that China reports its part-time and occasional workers of fishing and aquaculture together as "Unspecified", and that its "Marine fishing, NEI" includes inland fishing for 1995-2006 and 2014-2020.

  • FAO revises the whole series between releases, so releases should not be compared.

When the computer is online, the newest release is used, downloaded and converted the first time (a file under 1 MB) and saved in data_dir; offline, or with fao_settings(online = FALSE), the newest saved release is used.

References

FAO. Global employment in the primary sector of fisheries and aquaculture (FI_Employment), metadata and country notes of the release. https://www.fao.org/fishery/static/Data/

Coordinating Working Party on Fishery Statistics (CWP). Handbook of Fishery Statistics: fishers. https://www.fao.org/cwp-on-fishery-statistics/handbook/capture-fisheries-statistics/fishers/en/

FAO (2026). The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2026. Rome: FAO. doi:10.4060/cd8357en

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
employment <- load_fao_employment()
subset(employment, Country..Name. == "Norway" & Year == 2024)
notes <- attr(employment, "country_notes")
notes$note[notes$country_en == "China"]
} # }