Zambia faces a huge challenge in terms of local aquatic feed supply and one of the goals of the Development and Scaling of Sustainable Feed for Resilient Aquatic Food Systems in Sub-Saharan (FASA) project is to produce low-cost and highly nutritious aquatic feeds made from local ingredients.
The project is led by WorldFish, an international, non-profit research and innovation organization reducing hunger, malnutrition and poverty across Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
“The cost of the feed is exorbitantly high for most SMEs to afford, leading to some sacrificing quality. The high cost of aquatic feed has been attributed mainly to the import of feed ingredients. In some cases, farmers must travel long distances to obtain the commodity,” Rodrigue Yossa, a senior scientist at WorldFish who leads the project, was in Zambia.
Other challenges in Zambia’s aquaculture sector include low participation of women and high youth unemployment, which stands at 26.5 percent in 2021. Aquatic food production is one of the sectors with the potential to create jobs and improve household nutrition. Therefore, creating an enabling environment across the value chain is critical in encouraging women and youth engagement.
To achieve this, the project will focus on strengthening stakeholders’ capacity to integrate best practices toward a more sustainable feed sector and to incorporate new information on the nutritional requirements of numerous improved strains of tilapia and African catfish in Zambia.
Yossa recently meet various stakeholders to explore collaboration on the project.
The exercise was meant to foster value-aligned partnerships in order to achieve successful outcomes. Furthermore, the partnerships will help to fuel growth, innovation and create synergies in areas where similar efforts are being made in the country.
The team first met with the management and staff from the Natural Resources and Development College’s (NRDC) Basic Sciences and Fisheries Department to discuss potential collaboration on the upgrade of their fisheries wet lab. The FASA project builds on WorldFish and NDRC’s previous collaboration on two other projects, one on the wet lab and the other on the Aquaculture Skills Training Center.
The project researchers then visited six provinces in Zambia where the project will be implemented, namely Northern, Southern, Luapula, Eastern, Copperbelt and North Western, to conduct a scoping study of local feed ingredients in order to understand the availability of local ingredients for the development of nutritious aquatic feeds for the improved local fish species
They met with various small-scale farmers to determine which ingredients are readily available and can be explored further in the study. Small-scale farmers using local ingredients to formulate feed, an abattoir, hatchery and grow-out cage fish farmers, a fish farming cooperative and the National Aquaculture Research Centre (NARDC) were among the stakeholders visited.
WorldFish’s country director for Zambia and Southern Africa, Victor Siamudaala said; “If we cannot make feed affordable, the sector will struggle perpetually. With the growing involvement of smallholder businesses in aquaculture, it is imperative to create a resilient aquatic value chain.”
The FASA project will run from 2022 to 2027 with the goal of increasing income, boosting food security and reducing waste and pollution by developing low-cost and highly nutritious aquatic feeds from local ingredients.
The project will also take into account women and youth participation.
