AP has potential for aquaculture growth with its a long coastline

VIJAYAWADA: Speakers highlighted the growth potential for aquaculture in Andhra Pradesh in view of its long coastline of nearly 1,000 km.

The occasion was a seminar on ‘Entrepreneurship and empowerment in the aqua industry’, organised by the AP Chamber of Commerce here on Wednesday.

The chamber’s president, VL Indira Dutt, said the objective of the seminar was to create awareness of the potential of the industry in AP that has a long coastline of 974km and the Krishna-Godavari belt, which offers the ideal location for this industry.

“AP has a natural advantage in this sector. However, the waters have to be maintained without pollution and safeguards must be put in to ensure a good environment also to our future generations. The industry has the potential to turn wastelands into wealthlands with the development of this sector, where large tracts of land are required for breeding.”

She said, “Opportunities abound and with a controlled culture in the industry, this is considered to be the sunrise industry in the world.”

Manoj Kumar, deputy director MPEDA, said the reduction of post-harvesting losses and improvement of fish, prawn and other marine products for domestic consumption must be encouraged.

There are various schemes to support the industry under the MoEF, NFDE – National Fisheries Development etc. for enhancing the export potential and markets for entrepreneurs, he said.

He emphasized the need for going beyond just cleaning and skinning the fish for exports and adopting international practices for value-addition to the current export products, which add value by 4 to 5 times to the current revenues from non-value-added raw products.

Ramesh Rathod, senior scientist at the Central Institute for Freshwater Aquaculture, said, “The production costs in the feed by using pellets instead of traditional mixed feeds will reduce the cost of the feed, which is a substantial portion of the production costs.”

Poly-culture (ie, fish & prawn together) is cost-effective and a very viable method for increasing the sustainability of the business in aquaculture.“

P. Rammohan Rao, retired deputy director, state Institute of Fisheries Training, highlighted the importance of aqua-labs for monitoring and disease diagnosis, using various methods like RT-PCR and ELISA.

He suggested that farmers establish centralized labs which are expensive for individual farmers and said the government has schemes to support these aqua-labs.