The UN organization wants to intensify fish farming across the country with tilapia, a species of fish very popular in Ivory Coast, to make up for massive imports.
FAO organized, this Tuesday, April 30, 2024, in Abidjan, a multi-stakeholder partnership meeting in the farmed tilapia value chain, a platform aimed at supporting the process of sustainable development of the sector.
This meeting allowed stakeholders to review the various ongoing Fish4ACP projects, to discuss possible synergies, to strengthen their capacities in terms of governance and above all to discuss the multi-stakeholder partnership roadmap.
Ms. Foungnigué Djiré, administrator for the Fish4ACP project at FAO Côte d’Ivoire, indicated that the UN organization, as part of the research, met with Nangui Abrogoua University to work on fish foods.
“We have tests to do to provide food that is of quality and produced locally from our raw materials,” she declared, noting that “food has the most expensive cost” in the world. operation of a hatchery station.
“The idea is to associate a national structure, in this case a university, which can help to conduct these tests and show that from our local ingredients, we can also have quality food,” a- he added.
The multi-stakeholder partnership, part of the Fish4ACP project, aimed at promoting the potential of fishing and aquaculture, should make it possible to bring together the players in the value chain of the fishing sector, both at the level of the public sector and of the private sector.
In this context, a roadmap which extends over a period of two years, from 2024 to 2025, has been established to strengthen this multi-actor partnership. During this meeting, the actors discussed the activities for the coming months.
Dr Nicole Edwige Nezzi, Director of Aquaculture at the Ivorian Ministry of Animal and Fisheries Resources, stressed that fish farming should further contribute to a significant increase in national fish production.
According to her, “the capacities of local fishing are more or less affected and even reduced due to overfishing”. To do this, the State wants, with development partners, to accelerate fish farming across the country.
Maria Elena Molina Ruz, cooperation projects manager at the German Embassy in Côte d’Ivoire, reiterated her country’s commitment to supporting the implementation of the FishACP project with a view to long-term impact. .
The FAO plans to train around ten actors in Ghana, in particular those who produce fry, i.e. five from the private sector and five from the sector for training. They will be trained in a hatchery school in Ghana, a country neighboring Ivory Coast.
