Abstract

Spatialized catch and effort data, representing the world’s marine fisheries in the 1950s and the 2000s are presented in form of cartograms, i.e., global maps in which the surface areas of continents are made proportional to the magnitude of the annual catches and fishing effort by their fleets. This is complemented by an analysis of the flows of seafood between the continents in whose waters the fish were captured, in the 1950s and the 2000s, and the continents where fleets originated. Such broadbrush analyses of temporal changes and trade patterns are helpful to understand major trends of fisheries, which, are increasingly dominated by scarcity of fish, and competition, notably off the coast of West Africa, and in newly accessed polar waters.