SHAS­TRI BOODAN

Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter De­vant Ma­haraj says the Gov­ern­ment will be spend­ing $3.6 mil­lion to boost the aqua­cul­ture in­dus­try.He al­so an­nounced plans to re­vi­talise the Fish­eries Demon­stra­tion Pond at the Bam­boo Set­tle­ment Aqua­cul­ture Demon­stra­tion Cen­tre.

Ma­haraj said aqua­cul­ture could cre­ate sus­tain­able em­ploy­ment and re­ferred to a Food and Agri­cul­ture Or­gan­i­sa­tion (FAO) re­port which states that "aqua­cul­ture con­tin­ues to be the fastest-grow­ing an­i­mal food pro­duc­ing sec­tor" and in 2010 ac­count­ed for near­ly half (45.6 per cent) of the world's food fish con­sump­tion, com­pared with 33.8 per cent in 2000.Ma­haraj said there have been sig­nif­i­cant im­ports of fish and fish­ery prod­ucts, in par­tic­u­lar, frozen tilapia, which has been con­tribut­ing to T&T's high food im­port bill.

He said this de­mand can be met by in­creas­ing pro­duc­tion in the aqua­cul­ture sec­tor."Ap­prox­i­mate­ly 75 per cent of fish farm­ers can be con­sid­ered to be sub­sis­tence or back­yard farm­ers who, for a num­ber of rea­sons, are un­able to achieve economies of scale and hence com­mer­cial and eco­nom­ic vi­a­bil­i­ty," Ma­haraj said.He said Aqua­cul­ture Demon­stra­tion Cen­tre will be used for train­ing, field test­ing and demon­stra­tions.

In the long term, it will be used to field test the re­sults of re­search and de­vel­op­ment to­ward im­prov­ing in­puts and pro­vid­ing ap­pro­pri­ate tech­nol­o­gy/method­olo­gies for fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of the sec­tor.

The fa­cil­i­ties, to be com­plet­ed over a pe­ri­od of three years, will in­clude a train­ing room with fa­cil­i­ties to ac­com­mo­date at least 50 peo­ple at a time; small-scale and a medi­um-scale com­mer­cial green wa­ter re-cir­cu­lat­ing aqua­cul­ture sys­tem; race­way-type re­cir­cu­lat­ing fish rear­ing sys­tem; deep wa­ter re­cir­cu­lat­ing fish-rear­ing sys­tem; a lab­o­ra­to­ry area for han­dling and ex­am­i­na­tion of fish­es; and breed­ing sys­tems and fin­ger­ling pro­duc­tion for tilapia and cas­cadu­ra.

Ma­haraj said dur­ing the fis­cal year Oc­to­ber 2012�Sep­tem­ber 2013, 234 peo­ple have been trained in com­mer­cial aqua­cul­ture, 43 site vis­its were con­duct­ed for po­ten­tial farm­ers and eight new com­mer­cial aqua­cul­ture farm­ers have been reg­is­tered.In ad­di­tion, five new hatch­eries have start­ed pro­duc­tion of tilapia fin­ger­lings and the tilapia hatch­ery fa­cil­i­ty at Sug­ar­cane Feeds Cen­tre has been ex­pand­ed to en­sure a steady and re­li­able sup­ply of fin­ger­lings.