Tunisia’s Interprofessional Group of Fishing Products (GIPP), a public economic agency under the Tunisian Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources and Fisheries, is predicting more than 100 percent growth of the North African country’s aquaculture industry by 2030.
GIPP CEO Rakia Belkahia said the country would reach an annual aquaculture production of 45,000 metric tons (MT) within the next nine years, up from the current 22,000 MT.
Belkahia told media at this year’s International Frozen Seafood Exhibition (Conxemar) that Tunisia’s total fish output is estimated at 150,890 MT, of which 16 percent is from aquaculture. The industry on average generates TND 1.4 billion (USD 490 million, EUR 422.5 million).
Despite posting steady increases in production over the last few years, the country’s aquaculture industry still grapples with challenges that inhibit faster growth – such as a lack of legislative frameworks to govern its value-chain development, and insufficient marketing of the industry’s existing investment potential.
Aquaculture in Tunisia has long-term growth prospects of 10 percent annually “as aquaculture increasingly replaces wild catch in Tunisian diets,” a previous market report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) found.
The report, which listed sea bass and sea bream as the leading products in terms of quantity and value in Tunisia’s aquaculture industry, identifies “ineffective disease controls and poor feed-quality as causes for below average performance within the aquaculture sector.”
“Industry also indicates the sector is not well-organized in terms of value-chain integration, relying exclusively on middlemen to get aquaculture products from the farm to the marketplace,” the USDA report said.
Even if Tunisia achieves its predicted growth in aquaculture output by 2030, the government and private seafood sector would have to address the sliding per capita consumption of fishery products in the country, which USDA said dropped from 14 kilograms per person per year in 1988 to 12 kilograms in recent years.
Currently, analysts predict domestic demand for aquaculture products is likely to grow 10 percent in the medium- and long-term, “driven largely by the lower availability of wild-catch fishery products.”
Photo courtesy of the Food and Agriculture Organisation
