22 DECEMBER 2016 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WAS.ORG products a year (compared to the global average of 17 kg), but are beginning to consume more fish. While the market for red meat and poultry is considered saturated at around 40 kg/capita, there is considerable scope for growth in fish consumption with aquaculture well positioned to exploit this market gap. The challenge to local producers is to produce fish at a price that is competitive with imports. Growing a Fish-eating Nation Like the rest of the globe, South Africans are becoming a nation of “foodies.” Eating-out options have exploded over the past decade into diverse cuisines and ingredients, helping to move seafood into the mass-market with an ever-widening array of fish-focused restaurant franchises and fast-food outlets competing on equal footing with more traditional red meat, fried chicken and pizza offerings. A delicacy such as sushi, unheard of in local restaurants 20 years ago, has moved rapidly from upmarket and exclusive to widespread availability at the average supermarket food counter. Consumers are increasingly focused on healthy eating too, with fish seen as a healthier protein option. Interest in environmental sustainability, local sourcing and organic production is moving from the fringe into the mainstream. These trends all bode well for aquaculture production and public acceptance of high-quality, sustainably farmed fish products. While the move to greater fish consumption has mostly happened in the eating-out and fast food sphere, a critical success factor stimulating demand and creating a mass consumer market for seafood — which in turn supports aquaculture production — is encouraging consumers to buy more fish for home consumption. South African consumers in general, apart from small communities where fish forms part of their cultural traditions, tend to know very little about fish as a food source and are wary of buying and the past five years, has seen the emergence of a small but vibrant aquaculture sector producing highvalue products including abalone, trout, mussels, and oysters. Off the back of a well-established abalone export industry, recent growth and diversification in aquaculture has been stimulated by rising consumer demand for local, fresh, authentic and sustainable seafood. At the same time, the government’s aquaculture development policy has shifted from a production-driven to a value-chain approach where start-up projects are integrated into existing commercial value chains and government support is focused at the policy and enabling regulatory level, while the private sector drives the actual production and market-related aspects. Market-based incentives such as aquaculture sustainability labelling and enterprise development partnership schemes created by national retail chains offer a real opportunity for emerging aquaculture producers to develop value-chain orientated production from the outset. This has led to encouraging and significant growth in aquaculture’s contribution to fisheries production value and employment and aquaculture now ranks as South Africa’s third largest fishery sub-sector [see Text Box – South African Aquaculture By the Numbers, page 28]. Job creation is a vital statistic in a country with a 26 percent unemployment rate. In contrast to shrinking fishery employment, direct and indirect jobs in aquaculture have shown consistent growth since 2000. Although the country maintains a healthy trade surplus on aquaculture products, almost exclusively due to abalone exports, a trend of increasing imports of farmed and wild capture fish products indicates increased consumer demand as well as increasingly short supply of traditional fish products such as “line-fish” on the local market. South Africans consume a relatively small 7.5 kg/capita of fish The big opportunity for South African aquaculture is to replace imported with locally produced fish. The growth in eating-out fish consumption has largely been fed by imports, most of which are aquaculture products. Thus, the potential for South African aquaculture is to replace prawns from Vietnam and India, salmon from Scotland, Chile, and Norway, pangasius from Vietnam, and greenlip mussels from New Zealand on local shelves. Producers are already making inroads in this regard and the South African market is increasingly demanding environmentally sustainable seafood. Abalone rearing baskets with feeder plate on top. Abalone farm growout tanks and baskets.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjExNDY=