As a social scientist in an organization predominantly composed of the traditional natural scientists, it would have been easy for Food and Resource Economics Professor James Anderson to feel like a small fish in a big pond. However, he recognized a valuable opportunity for collaboration where an understanding of economics was necessary for the overall understanding of our global aquaculture systems. His pioneering impact on the development of the field of aquaculture economics has resulted in his recent recognition as the 2026 World Aquaculture Society (WAS) Fellow.
“Receiving this recognition as a WAS Fellow is a big deal for me, and it raises the profile of economics in a professional society dominated by traditional natural scientists,” Anderson said.
Anderson’s own interest in the discipline started not with economics, but with the first fish tank he owned as a child.
“I had several aquariums and I fished all the time,” Anderson said. “In my first year at William and Mary, I took an excellent economics course. That course made it clear to me that understanding economics is essential for thoughtful and efficient management of fisheries and fish farming.”
Anderson, who wrote one of the first comprehensive books on international seafood trade, has watched the aquaculture industry evolve rapidly over the past few decades.
“Aquaculture has been around for thousands of years in one form or another, but it went from a relatively minor contribution to over 50 percent of global seafood production just between the 80s and the 2020s,” Anderson said.
As the industry has grown, so too has the prevalence of aquaculture economics as a subfield.“Along with colleagues Drs. Frank Asche, Thomas Anderson, and Andrew Ropicki, UF has the lead in applying economics to these problems,” Anderson said.
One of Anderson’s largest contributions to the global aquaculture industry? The development of a standardized system for comparison, the Aquaculture Performance Indicators (APIs).
“Everyone has different ways they rank things, and so the development of the indicators gave us a standardized way to compare and gain perspective on the whole of the global aquaculture industry,” Anderson said.
By spending more than a decade evaluating over 80 different global aquaculture systems and collaborating with a wide range of interdisciplinary experts, Anderson was able to develop a single, standardized assessment tool that is the first of its kind. In addition, they also developed a similar set of Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs).
“Currently, my work with colleagues, to develop the Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs) and Aquaculture Performance Indicators (APIs) has been very gratifying,” Anderson said. “The FPIs and APIs are the first approach to comprehensively assess the economic, environmental and community performance of aquaculture systems that is comparable between technology, species and region.”
The assessment tool has had a wide-ranging impact through not only their own research, but its wide applicability. Other researchers and global organizations such as the UN FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) have also begun to adopt its use in their work.
Anderson views the contributions of economists and of the larger World Aquaculture Society as tantamount not only to the success of the industry itself, but to the role aquaculture will play answering key global challenges such as food security in the future.
“Aquaculture is much more important than people realize,” Anderson said. “It fastest growing animal protein sector, it accounts for almost all of growth in global seafood supply in the past decades and it represents the major share of US seafood imports.” New technologies and policies are regularly being implemented to address challenges related to topics such as production systems, disease management, sustainability, international trade, and human behavior. Overcoming each of these hurdles requires an economist’s perspective to succeed.
“Many of the of the failures in aquaculture come from misunderstandings of the economics in the system,” Anderson said.
As a member of the World Aquaculture Society for over 40 years, Anderson hopes to leave a legacy through the tools he pioneered such as the APIs & FPIs, but also through the eyes opened to the relevance and importance of economics research as part of the broader discussion.
‘I hope I have helped raise the profile and understanding of economics at the World Aquaculture Society and with the aquaculture policymakers and investors,” Anderson said. ”I hope my work in aquaculture economics has opened the eyes of traditional agricultural economics to the importance and growth.”
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