10 JUNE 2015 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WAS.ORG aquaculture volume in the country. Farming of both species is carried out predominantly in northeast Brazil, which accounts for 1/3 of the country’s total aquaculture production. The objectives of this article are to provide an overview of shrimp and tilapia culture in northeast Brazil and present the trends that have culminated in the recent phase of expansion. History and Species Northeast Brazil has over 3,000 km of coastline, with tropical temperatures of 26-28 C throughout the year. Coastal land in rural areas is widely available and still poorly explored. Much of the economy in these areas relies on tourism or primary production activities such as artisanal fisheries, salt production, aquaculture and rainfed or irrigated agriculture. In upper states of the northeast, towards the Amazon, water is abundant and large-scale soybean and cattle production are conducted. However, in much of the Shrimp and tilapia production has accelerated in northeast Brazil in recent years, driven by increasing domestic demand and improvements in farming technology. Although early developments in aquaculture in the country date to the 1930s, with success of induced spawning of native freshwater fish, commercial aquaculture only started to expand in the 1990s with the introduction of Pacific whiteleg shrimp Litopenaeus vannamei and the Chitralada strain of Nile tilapia Oreochromis niloticus. In this period, aquaculture began to achieve industrial scale, with national production increasing from 87,674 t in 1997 to 278,129 t in 2003 (IBAMA 2008). In the succeeding ten years, production grew at an average annual rate of 6.5 percent, reaching 476,521 t in 2013 (IBGE 2014). In 2014, tilapia and shrimp production was estimated to have reached 207,400 and 90,000 t, respectively (Fig. 1). This corresponded to more than 60 percent of the total harvested Overview and Latest Developments in Shrimp and Tilapia Aquaculture in Northeast Brazil Alberto J.P. Nunes and Itamar de Paiva Rocha FIGURE 1. Annual production of farm-raised marine shrimp and tilapia in Brazil since 2003. Tilapia and shrimp production estimates are from FAO and ABCC (Brazilian Shrimp Farmers Association), respectively. Data for 2015 are estimates. FIGURE 2. Several red strains of tilapia have been evaluated in Brazil (A) but commercial culture consolidated using the Thai-Chitralada Nile strain (B). Photos: Alberto Nunes. A. B.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjExNDY=