Over the past 50 years, Asia became the main supplier of aquaculture products in the world. Positioned on the junction between the three main producing countries (China, India and Indonesia), the key geographic position of Singapore led to call it the center of aquaculture production. This statement raised the question of the actual position of aquaculture gravity center for farm production, science production and investment.
Material and methods. To answer this question, we develop a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) methodology to track the movements of the World’s Aquaculture Centre of Gravity (WACG) between 1950 and 2019. Combining international data base of FAO, World Bank, lens.org and MIT, the model uses the latitudes and longitudes of 212 country centroids to build vectors in a Cartesian spherical system and to map WACG positions in a Mercator projection. Same methodology was applied to subgroups like aquatic plants, molluscs, crustaceans, diadromous and marine fish.
Results. When the WACG aimed at Singapore over the last 70 years, it is strongly attracted by Chinese centroid and, is located in the Sichuan province, 30 km North from the city of Chengdu (Figure 1). The traces movements highlighted the role of the artificial breeding discoveries in the 50’s, the rise of the salmon sector in the 80’s, the role of aquaculture policies in China in the 80’s, the geographical diffusion of shrimp outbreaks in the 90’s and the rapid growth of Indonesian farming sector. The origin of scientific publication in the aquaculture domain, since 1975, showed that science production is more homogeneously distributed between countries (China, USA, India, UK, Brazil) and located in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia (λ: 62.0868, φ: 58.9182). The growing position of China is this domain is also visible with a South-East movement over the last 4 years.
WACG methodology appeared to be a fruitful GIS approach to understand trends of aquaculture sector. The current work also emphasizes the importance of macro-economic data collection in this industry to develop more applications at national, regional and local levels to map sustainable capacity of food production.