Asia

Indonesia-based aquaculture specialist Retno Nuraini’s continual work on sustainable production has led her to join Deliberate Capital, an investment company which is providing financial and technical expertise to smallholder shrimp farmers.

Aarti Burman, founder of AB Fish Products, who hails from a remote village in West Bengal, is one of the most successful female fish farmers in the state.

Asia’s shrimp farmers need to reboot their attitude to biosecurity and stocking densities, argues Robins McIntosh, in a follow-on to Monday’s article on the dangers of disinfection*.

The overuse of disinfectants, coupled with farmers’ willingness to exceed their systems’ carrying capacities, have been key factors in the downfall of the Asian shrimp sector over the last decade, according to Robins McIntosh*.

The production of shrimp in Asia is likely to experience minimal growth in 2023, according to Gorjan Nikolik, who also argues that prices are unlikely to improve much from their current level.

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.

Indonesia has developed a range of local strains of tilapia, largely to improve growth rates and general disease resistance, but there’s still scope for these to be more widely adopted.