Pakistan’s government has authorized the scale-up of a pilot project designed to promote shrimp farming in the country’s inland areas.
The shrimp-farming cluster development project, worth PKR 5.4 billion (USD 24 million, EUR 23 million), was approved in 2019 as part of Pakistan’s Agriculture Transformation Plan and has a slated end-date of 2024. The Pakistan Ministry of National Food Security and Research, the Pakistan Fisheries Development Board, and several provincial fisheries departments are co-managers of the project, which was originally slated to cover 3,500 farms in Punjab province.
In mid-November 2022, the project’s coordinating committee moved to expand the project to 10,600 shrimp farms, including some in the provinces of Sindh, Balochistan, and Islamabad Capital Territory, according to ProPakistani.
Farmers selected to join the project will receive a subsidy for pond construction and development of related infrastructure, as well as subsidies for buying shrimp seed and aquafeed. The subsidy for farm construction will be PKR 120,000 (USD 535, EUR 513) per acre, with a 10-acre maximum. Punjab will have the highest approved farming area in the project with 7,200 acres, followed by Sindh with 2,300 acres and Balochistan with 1,100 acres.
The model applied in the pilot project is semi-intensive shrimp farming, with a stocking density of 60,000 shrimp seeds in each one-acre pond. Expected output is between 1,450 and 1,500 kilograms of shrimp per acre, with an expected sales price of between PKR 800 and PKR 850 (USD 3.50 and USD 3.80, EUR 3.40 and EUR 3.60) per kilogram.
The project estimates farmers participating in the pilot will earn between PKR 1.1 million and PKR 1.15 million (USD 4,906 and USD 5,129, EUR 4,705 and EUR 4,919) of gross income and between PKR 500,000 and PKR 550,000 (USD 2,234 and USD 2,452, EUR 2,139 and EUR 2,353) of net income per acre, with per-acre operational costs ranging from PKR 550,000 to PKR 600,000 (USD 2,452 to USD 2,675, EUR 2,352 to EUR 2,568).
Separately, in December 2021, Pakistan announced a plan to develop climate-resilient shrimp farming across the country. The program, valued at PKR 6 billion (USD 26.7 million, EUR 25.6 million), will seek to involve the country’s shrimp hatcheries, research centers, shrimp farms, shrimp processing plants, and feed mills in formulating a plan to deal with the various impacts of climate change.
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