WORLD AQUACULTURE 7 Asian Pacific Chapter Update I am writing this far away from the Asian Pacific Region, looking at the cold, blue-green waters of the North Atlantic where I am vacationing with family. The seafood is excellent and I plan to dine shortly on some farmed oysters from the Bay of Maine. Normally this would be a low period for Chapter activities, yet the APC has been very active recently and we will have exciting things to report at the upcoming WAS Board meeting in Prague. We held a very successful regional meeting, the Australasian Aquaculture 2012 Conference and Trade Show, from 1-4 May in Melbourne, Australia. Over 900 people attended this event and there was a broad range of aquaculture represented: research (40%), industry (23%), government (15%), service industry (9%), education (8%), and other (5%). The event had several other associated activities, including a simulation of a national seafood health scare (funded by Seafood Services Australia) that brought together a group of seafood professionals to test how the Australian Seafood Incident Response Plan would work in practice. We held the inaugural Australasian Aquaculture Awards (The Blue Thumbs), had several interesting field trips and following the conference, the AquaEd program, which was supported by NMIT and sponsored by AgriFood Skills Australia. The WAS APC Board has passed a framework for the creation of an Executive Advisory Council (EAC) and Country Ambassadors (CA) Program. Ram Bhujel, APC Board EAC and CA liaison, has worked diligently to fill positions for the Executive Advisory Council and national representatives (CAs). The EAC positions have now been filled and Robert Bishop (APC Past-President 2005-2007) is Chairman. The first meeting of the EAC is planned for mid-August. Changes to the APC website continue. We encourage APC members to add material to the new APC National Information section. We also welcome Arabic, Chinese and Japanese submissions, which will be posted in those languages. Ideally a corresponding English translation should also be included, unless you trust the abilities of Google Translate! The APC Facebook page has been steadily gaining members and Jimmy Lim, an APC member and an EAC representative for Southeast Asia, has offered to help broaden the people involved with this resource. In May and June, Roy Palmer (APC Past President 2009-2011) traveled to Japan and met with WAS members there to discuss the potential for a symposium on high-value aquaculture. Also at that time the mechanism for merging the Asian Pacific Chapter and Japan Chapter was discussed and we now welcome the new APC members from Japan. We look forward to having more activities involving Japanese members and issues important to northern Asia. In June, I travelled to Myanmar to discuss the idea of a symposium related to helping Myanmar create an Aquaculture Development Plan. I worked with our APC Myanmar Country Ambassador Kyaw Tun Myint and many influential aquaculture stakeholders in Yangon and a draft outline was created to use a phased approach to developing such a plan. Looking westward, the APC has had several strategy meetings with APC members in the United Arab Emirates to plan for an “Arid Land Aquaculture Symposium” that is now targeted for some time in March to May 2013. We hope to bring together people that live in arid lands to discuss the current status and future potential for aquaculture there. If you have an interest in taking part in this event, or better yet, helping plan and execute it, please contact us through the APC email. Related to this event we hope to have a recirculating aquaculture workshop and field trips. The next APC meeting will be in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2013. The Steering Committee (chaired by APC President-Elect Amrit Bart) met in Ho Chi Minh City in June. The theme for this event will be “Positioning for Profit,” in light of the greater need for aquaculture to improve value at each step of the value chain. This event will occur at the Saigon Exhibition and Convention Center on December 1013, 2013 and the International Oyster Symposium (IOS5) will be held concurrently as a session of this meeting. Prior to the conference we hope to have a simulated aquaculture disease outbreak exercise, similar to the one in Melbourne, which will work to develop strategies to prevent aquaculture diseases from getting out of hand. Following the conference, we plan to have an Asian AquaEd meeting to discuss how Asia can better train and develop aquaculture professionals in the region. Plans are proceeding for World Aquaculture 2014, which will take place in Adelaide, Australia on 7-11 June 2014. The theme for this event is “Create, Nurture, Grow.” This will be the de facto regional APC conference for 2014. World Aquaculture 2015 will convene in Jeju, Korea, which will also be the de facto regional meeting for the APC in 2015. Roy Palmer is the Program Chair for this meeting and Bill Daniels and I are on the Steering Committee. The first steering committee meeting for WA 2015 will be in November. Finally, after holding relatively steady for some time, APC membership is growing. For example, Myanmar membership increased dramatically after giving a presentation to a large group about WAS during my recent trip there. Throughout the region, more people have been joining or rejoining WAS and APC. Several current WAS members who were not also APC members have added the APC to their membership. Hopefully if you are not yet a member of WAS or the APC, chapter activities will encourage you to join. Even if you are a member of a different Chapter, it is never too late to join the APC! You can contact the WAS Home Office (CarolM@was.org) and be guided through the procedure to join the APC. If you are in the Asian region and not yet a member of the WAS or APC Chapter please feel free to contact us via our email (apcwas@was.org) and be sure to visit our (CONTINUED ON PAGE 18)
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