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The international development community is off-track from meeting targets for alleviating global malnutrition. Meanwhile, there is growing consensus across scientific disciplines that fish plays a crucial role in food and nutrition security. However, this ‘fish as food’ perspective has yet to translate into policy and development funding priorities. We argue that the traditional framing of fish as a natural resource emphasizes economic development and biodiversity conservation objectives, whereas situating fish within a food systems perspective can lead to innovative policies and investments that promote nutrition-sensitive and socially equitable capture fisheries and aquaculture. This paper highlights four pillars of research needs and policy directions toward this end. Ultimately, recognizing and working to enhance the role of fish in alleviating hunger and malnutrition can provide an additional long-term development incentive, beyond revenue generation and biodiversity conservation, for governments, international development organizations, and society more broadly to invest in the sustainability of capture fisheries and aquaculture.

Small‐scale fisheries contribute substantially to the sustainability of coastal communities by providing livelihood and economic opportunities and ensuring food security. However, their geographic range of operation overlaps with that of industrial fisheries, increasing the resource competition, risk of vessel collision and inter‐sector conflicts, while jeopardizing the sustainability of fish stocks. When industrial vessels venture into waters that are reserved to artisanal fisheries, their operations become illegal. In Africa, the extent of such operations, beyond their legal implications, has resulted in severe economic, food security and maritime safety issues. In this paper, we use automatic identification system data derived from satellite technology to predict fishing operations and find that industrial fleets spend 3%–6% of their time fishing within inshore areas reserved for small‐scale fisheries between 2012 and 2016, of the total 4.2 million industrial fishing hours within the Exclusive Economic Zones of African countries. We assessed the total fishing effort by this form of illegal fishing operations at 166 million kWhours at least out of 4.9 billion kWhours in total. We discuss this dangerous form of illegal fishing, which often results in deadly collisions with small‐scale sector operators, increases competition and conflicts over fisheries access, threatens the sustainability of fish stocks, and calls for better governance, and protection.

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The ocean economy is growing as commercial use of the ocean accelerates, while progress toward achieving international goals for ocean conservation and sustainability is lagging. In this context, the private sector is increasingly recognized as having the capacity to hamper efforts to achieve aspirations of sustainable ocean-based development or alternatively to bend current trajectories of ocean use by taking on the mantle of corporate biosphere stewardship. Here, we identify levels of industry concentration to assess where this capacity rests. We show that the 10 largest companies in eight core ocean economy industries generate, on average, 45% of each industry’s total revenues. Aggregating across all eight industries, the 100 largest corporations (the “Ocean 100”) account for 60% of total revenues. This level of concentration in the ocean economy presents both risks and opportunities for ensuring sustainability and equity of global ocean use.