By Elias Ngalame
AMDOU Belo, a fish farmer Lado in the North Cameroon, cannot hide his excitement about what he has been harvesting from his fish cages lately. His tilapia fish production has more than doubled from three to seven tonnes. But it wasn’t always like this. Until five years ago, fish farmers here grappled with low productivity as result of poor breeding and stunted growth.
However, their fortunes started changing when in early the government and the Aquaculture Compact of Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) enrolled them on a training programme on quality water testing for fish breeding. Some 3000 fish farmers were trained under the programme. The fish farmers learnt how to provide suitable conditions for breeding in their cages, including ensuring the right temperature of the fish farming or pond water, the pH, ammonia concentration in the pond water.
“Different fish species have different range of water quality aspects. Knowing the temperature, the pH, oxygen concentration, salinity etc, within which the different fish species can survive, grow and reproduce optimally is very important,” Dr Ngoge Epie Henry of the Ministry of livestock and fisheries in Cameroon said.
“Water parameters influence fish behaviour and growth, so testing to ensure the right water quality is imperative.” Participants also learnt how to select and manage brood stock for production of quality fingerlings and fish production as well as how to put in place a longterm developmental programme for fish production by private investors.
According to the delegate for agriculture in the North region, since the farmers adopted the new technologies of testing and ensuring water quality and better management practices to breed fish, their outputs have increased in quality and quantity. “My farm modified its infrastructure with the right water quality to start producing tilapia mono-sex male
fingerlings and within 12 months, it produced over 230,000 mono sex male tilapia fingerlings,” said Mhai Guddy. “With the adoption of these technologies leading to enhanced technical skills in production of mono-sex tilapia fingerlings, the farm recorded an income of 500,000 fcfa in 2022.” Sponsored by the African Development Bank as part of its Feed Africa Initiative, TAAT’s main objective for the project was to improve the business of agriculture across Africa by raising agricultural productivity, mitigating risks and promoting diversification and processing in 18 agricultural value chains within eight priority intervention areas.
The programme increases agricultural productivity through the deployment of proven and high-performance agricultural technologies at scale along selected nine commodity compacts which include aquaculture, a Press release from TAAT says. Led by the WorldFish Centre, TAAT Aquaculture Compact (TAC) disseminates aquaculture technologies that increase value chain actors’ productivity, increasing fish protein consumption and enhancing sustainability across the value chain.