Online Reporter
MANY Zimbabweans like eating fish, and so long as the costs are not too high and there are no health risks, would almost certainly eat quite a lot more.
So more than doubling the output and value of aquaculture over the next five years makes sense.
Over the past three decades aquaculture has rapidly overtaken the output of natural fisheries, the wild caught fish, that used to dominate the fish trade. We might still be hovering around the 35 000 mark in how much fish we eat.
But the switch over has seen the wild caught tonnage slashed from around 27 000 tonnes a year in the 1990s to 5 000 tonnes a year now as natural stocks decline through overfishing and some pollution, while farmed fish output has taken up the strain with an output just above 31 000 tonnes a year.
The challenge now is to get the volume and value of farmed fish in aquaculture right up, and then working out how to get some of the extra fish to the fast growing urban markets by freezing it through cold chains or through the far older technologies of pickling and drying.
Much of recent work on expanding aquaculture has been with the village and school business units, using tanks and getting water from the borehole that these units are centred on or, in the best watered areas, using natural streams.
There has also been a sustained programme of introducing fish to the large irrigation dams that the Second Republic has been commissioning and building, and where a lot of future expansion is targeted.
Fingerling production has been rapidly increased with old centres upgraded or refurbished and new breeding centres being set up. This at least ensures a rapidly rising supply of the starting point of any fishery, the very young fish that must be allowed to grow.
Work is in progress on developing fish foods that can be produced locally, within the fishing community, rather than trucked in or even more expensively imported.
While we cannot and should not ignore the commercial fish foods, by the time all the extra gathering, harvesting, processing and transport has pushed up the price, sometimes making the final fish harvest too expensive for many to eat.
So a lot more needs to be done over the community production of fish feeds for community fish farmers, allowing everyone to make a reasonable living from their efforts without making the final product too expensive to sell.
The second challenge involves how to preserve fish for urban and other more distant markets. Zimbabwe is a warm country, and fish notoriously spoil quite quickly unless processing and preservation start early.
Most fresh fish around the world has to be frozen or preserved using the ancient technologies of drying and pickling if it cannot be eaten totally fresh within around 24 hours.
In Zimbabwe, the new pressure for small fish farms as part of the village business units is to be able to supply fish to local communities at the price of other fresh proteins.
The other challenge is to able to compete with poultry, goats and beef. This provides yet another stream of income within these communities, important as small scale farmers have to move away from monocultures to having as many income streams as possible to move into upper-middle income lifestyles.
One major fishery, the kapenta fishery at Lake Kariba — built around the kapenta fish introduced some decades ago from the East African great lakes, relies on drying the fish very quickly and with negligible processing, which is quite easy when the whole fish is dried and the fish are so tiny. Deep frozen fish, usually bream or bream fillets, can be found in deep freezers, but prices are similar to those of imported sea fish.
As Zimbabwean incomes rise with economic growth, the frozen fish market will grow, but there will always be considerable demand for a less expensive product that still gives fish farmers a decent return.
This might well require some work on how best to use the technologies developed over the past few millennia to dry and pickle fish, so they can be safely eaten at least over the next few months and sometimes over the next year or so.
This was the traditional method in Zimbabwe, where a dispersed population made the fresh fish trade a bit dubious, and now with growing urbanisation away from most major dams makes it impossible without preservation.
Whole national cuisines have been built up over how to use dried, salted and pickled fish, and often the identical product once seen as a basic food has been converted into more of a luxury item, so there is nothing wrong with the older technology, just making sure it is done right with quality products and making sure that the final products have a good market.
While building up aquaculture is important, we have to make sure that all the threads are there: the stocking of fish tanks and irrigation dams; the feeding and supplementary feeding and the best ways of doing this; the preservation of the harvested fish that are not going to be eaten almost immediately; and the building up of markets where people want to buy fish.
