By Egbodo Queen
One of the most significant issues affecting Nigerian fish producers is the unending rise in fish feed prices. These prices have increased by an incredible 75% in the past year.
The world total fisheries report by the World Bank’s most recent data in 2018 showed that Nigeria is currently Africa’s third largest producer of fish at 1,169, 478 metric tons. Egypt was the first producing at the rate of 1,934, 743 while Morocco occupied the second position at 1, 387, 815 metric tons.
Nigeria has a significant demand for fish due to its large population and the nutritional value of fish in the local diet. However, Nigeria is far from being self-sufficiency in her fish supply, with a deficit of about 2.3 million tons being imported annually. Aquaculture contributes about 15% to the domestic fish production in the country.
In the recent past, fish farming is very lucrative business as many fsh farmers in the country are making big money every month from sale of fish and fingerlings. For exmple, to raaise tilapia fish, as well as other type of fishes can earn a fish farmer a very huge income because fish farming is regarded profitable business.
The aquaculture sector in Nigeria has been growing and plays a significant role in the employment creation, income generation, the supply of nutritional requirements, provision of valuable protein for human consumption and national development. For this, there has been increase in demand for fish in the country. The surge in demand has always been driven by factors such as population growth, urbanization, changing dietary preferences, and the increasing awareness of the health benefits of fish consumption.
Despite numerous advantages of aquaculture, the sector is confronted by several challenges and, in recent time, aquaculture like other livestock industry in the country, have been facing some critical challenges due to the current economic situation in Nigeria.
Related Posts
In the past weeks, I have gone round to interact with fish farmers in vrious locations in my local government area and all the places I visited, the story was just the same. There is not glut of fish expected in most of the fish farms visited owing to the current cost of production for fish farming business.
After my visit to some selected fish farm in my area, the cost of feed cost which has kept increasing drastically is the key challenge pointed at by the fish farmers. They explained that the fish feed has become so expensive to the extent that they cannot just pass this cost of production to their output. Therefore, it became difficult for many fish farmers to embark on producing more fish like before owing to the high cost of fish feed.
Most of the fish farmers I visited their farm informed that if they manage to sell off their current stock, they will no longer be stocking, until the cost of fish feed come down to enable them made gains. Others said they are going to reduce their stock capacity due to reduced working capital because of decreasing profit margin after months of hard work, energy and other inputs involved.
The challenges confronting fish farmers in Nigeria are numerous. They include lack of capital, high cost of labour, lack of land, lack of modern technologies, poaching, inadequate water supply, mortality of fish, rising fish feed prices and importantly, poor storage facilities that often lead to waste.
Many of the fish farmers in the country today just managed to break even, many are selling at loss, only a small percentage of them are making marginal profits. This is what an expert in the sector refer to as the dilemma of fish farmers. The expert suggested that much need be done to develop the aquaculture industry through restructuring and aggregating fish market, developed more products from the Catfish.
Also, the expert noted that farm gate price of fish should be regulated so that more profit margin will go back to the fish farmer who labour so much to produce the fish and contribute to food and nutrition security.
Above all, there should be import duty waiver on imported feed raw materials. All these will go a long way to bring down the price of fish feed and the sector will boom again.
