Aquaculture America 2023

February 23 - 26, 2023

New Orleans, Louisiana USA

ECONOMIC COTNRIBUTIONS OF FLORIDA'S AQUACULTURE INDUSTRIES: FOOD FISH COMMODITY GROUP

Robert Botta*, João-Pedro Ferreira, Edward Camp, Christa Court, Andrew Ropicki

 Food and Resource Economics Department

 University of Florida

 Gainesville, FL 32611

 Botta822@ufl.edu

 



 Florida’s aquaculture industry is extremely diverse, producing approximately 1,500 species or varieties of fish, plants, mollusks, crustaceans, corals, and reptiles for food and non-food markets. This industry is expected to grow due to a suite of factors, including demand for seafood products and recently established recommendations by the state government to promote improved aquaculture development.  Continual production growth within the aquaculture industry will generate additional economic activity throughout Florida’s economy via purchases of input goods and services and the re-spending of employee income. However, the estimation of the total economic contributions for aquaculture is quite difficult as data is extremely limited, specifically information consisting of detailed industry expenditure patterns. This research addresses these data limitations by using the best publicly available economic data in conjunction with previously published expenditure pattern data for the food fish aquaculture commodity group. We use an Input-Output analysis approach and IMPLAN© regional economic modeling software to estimate the economic contributions of this commodity group. We find that this industry generated approximately $7.5 million in industry output while supporting approximately 57 jobs in 2020. This study provides a better understanding of the food fish aquaculture commodity group’s role in the state economy while detailing future requirements to consider when quantifying the economic role of various aquaculture industries.