Following a challenging seven years, Nigeria’s first commercial-scale black tiger prawn producer is now up, running and ready to supply high end markets with ASC certified shrimp – from Lagos, to Rotterdam and beyond.
The past few months have been gruelling for a number of tilapia farmers on the Kenyan side of Lake Victoria, with the deaths of hundreds of millions of fish.
Benjamin Orishaba, a 28-year-old Ugandan, is currently managing three tilapia hatcheries for a government fish farming project in Cote D’Ivoire and also runs his own aquaculture consultancy company.
Basel Ahmed is the founder and CEO of Octopus, which claims to be the, “first scientific aquaculture initiative in Egypt and the Arab region that is managed by youth and covers production, disease control and environmental awareness."
Most of the fish currently farmed in the sea are carnivores, but there’s a strong argument for producing more marine herbivores, which don’t depend on diets containing fish meal and fish oil.
Yasmin Abdullah is a researcher at the Fish Farming and Technology Institute at Suez Canal University and also works in one of Egypt’s largest national aquaculture projects.
Mohamed Adel, chairman and managing director of the Suez Canal Aquaculture Company, offers an insight into one of the most ambitious aquaculture projects ever to have been constructed in Africa.
While the introduction of invasive non-native species such as Nile perch and water hyacinth have had a catastrophic impact on the biodiversity of Lake Victoria, a growing number of initiatives to control them may help to limit the damage and create new jobs.
Seaweed aquaculture and kelp forest restoration are getting a tentative nod as a blue carbon strategy – but the way policymakers structure carbon credits and offsets may make its benefits theoretical instead of bankable.
Recent genetic advances are being heralded as possible game-changers for the tiger prawn (Penaeus monodon) farming sector, potentially bringing a welcome renaissance to a sector that has fallen far behind vannamei shrimp in the past decades.
A traditional Chinese herbal prophylactic, containing bioavailable phytonutrients recovered from the Camellia sinensis tea bush, has been shown to protect shrimp from outbreaks of AHPND and WSSV.
Kenya’s trout farming sector might be small, and facing challenges, but it still has great potential to grow, according to two of the sector’s key players.
Although Tunisia has a relatively undeveloped aquaculture sector, it has huge potential – with 1,350 kilometres of Mediterranean coastline, a maritime domain of over 80,000 square kilometres and seven lagoons covering 100,000 hectares.
