TECHNICAL EFFICIENTY OF CHINA AQUACULTURE: THE CASE OF LARGE YELLOW CROAKER FARMING

Jinghua Xie* and Frank Asche
School of Business and Economics, UiT-The Arctic University of Norway
9037 Tromso, Norway Xie.jinghua@uit.no
 

In view of limited fishery resources, aquaculture has played an important role in world seafood supply and has a huge potential for contributing to world food nutrition and security in the future. According to world Food and Agricultural Organization statistics, China alone contributes to more than 60% of global aquaculture production volume. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate the current technical efficiency of China aquaculture and thus to further understand the possible potential for China to continue providing fish to meet world demand for seafood.

Large yellow croaker is one of the top three farmed finfish in China. Farmed large yellow croakers are sold both to domestic and overseas markets. Therefore, the case study of large yellow croaker could well present the situation of China aquaculture in general.  In the study, we used the data collected from 348 farmers in main farming sites of large yellow croaker located along the coastline of southeastern China. A stochastic frontier function model was applied to estimate the efficiency of China large yellow croaker farming and to identify the factors affecting the efficiency.

The estimated mean efficiency rate is 0.829. It suggests China has some margin to enlarge aquaculture production by increasing productivity, but not so much. To gain efficiency, technology training, industry clustering, industry organizations, which help to coordinate farming activities between the traditional small farmers are crucially important. Fishmeal is the main contributor for growing output. Negative sign of medicine indicates fishing diseases decreases output. These results suggest that condensed farming using large amount of fishmeal has consequently increased frequency of occurrences of fish diseases. The margin to increase production efficiency is moderate. At the same time, fish farming is competing with other industries for fishing sites. Therefore, it is uncertain about the contribution of China aquaculture to word sustainable food supply in the future.