Hatching Dreams for a Better Life

The classic fish story is about the one that got away. The modern story for
many commercially important fish is that not enough got away. The world is
running out of fish to catch. It’s been estimated that stocks of some marine
fish have declined by 90 percent in the last 50 years. To meet the demand for
protein from a growing human population, and to take pressure off of dwindling
wild stocks of fish, people are turning to fish farming.

For more than 20 years, Hillary Egna, a resource geographer at Oregon State
University, has led an international program that connects U.S. scientists
with researchers in developing countries around the world. The goal? To help
impoverished parts of the world develop small-scale aquaculture and sustainable
fisheries.

AquaFish is one of nine Collaborative Research Support Programs within USAID,
the federal agency for international development. As director of the program,
Egna has overseen more than 70 projects that have connected 25 U.S. land-grant
universities with research partners in more than 30 host countries.

“It’s less about fish than about poverty reduction,” Egna said. “We work with
people who work with the poor, and we help them build capacity for small-scale
economic development.”

There’s the old saying that when you give a man a fish, he has food for a
day; when you teach a man to fish, he has food for a lifetime. The AquaFish
program at OSU is dedicated to that proposal. Developing countries can no longer
count on foreign aid to provide their people with food and finances. It is
increasingly important for these countries to establish profitable businesses
that will sustain local communities. Aquaculture can provide both nourishment
and employment to these countries.

Since 1980, AquaFish CRSP (and an earlier program that focused on pond aquaculture)
has trained scientists around the globe, from Rwanda to Nicaragua to Vietnam.
More than 800 students have been formally trained in aquaculture research and
management professions. Those professionals in turn have reached more than
30,000 people through local workshops and community projects.

“This has created a huge international network of researchers and trained
practitioners who share knowledge within and among host countries,” Egna said.
“Our partners are our projects. They are their countries’ agents of change.”
By training scientists and Extension educators in their own countries, the
AquaFish program builds capacity in these countries to establish and sustain
industries in hatchery production, fish farming, and marketing of aquatic products.

Aquaculture has been an industry in Southeast Asia for millennia. But in parts
of Africa and Latin America, it is a relatively new idea, only recently embraced
by developing nations. In Kenya, for example, the national economic stimulus
plan calls for 48,000 new fishponds to be built in the next two years. Such
a massive investment by the Kenyan government demands knowledge in engineering,
fisheries research and management, marketing, and food safety. Many of those
who authored the government’s aquaculture plan were educated through the AquaFish
collaborative research support program, and the new ponds are being built under
the supervision of AquaFish CRSP-trained Kenyan officers.

“The success of our program relies heavily on the education, training, and
hands-on experience that we have received from our partnership with the AquaFish
CRSP,” said Godfrey Monor, Kenya’s Director of Fisheries.

Most of these new ponds will be for tilapia, the most common farmed fish in
the world. Unlike salmon that have a checkered reputation as farmed fish, tilapia
are not top-of-the-food-chain carnivores. For the same reason that the first
farmers raised sheep and not lions, most fish farmers in developing countries
raise fish grazers, not predators.

Increasingly, AquaFish researchers are exploring ecosystem models with minimal
impact on the surrounding environment. In the Philippines, researchers are
studying production of tilapia, shrimp, oysters, and edible seaweeds in integrated
ecosystems. In Mexico, AquaFish researchers are studying how to use bacteria
to remove a sex-changing hormone from the water in tilapia tanks before the
water is discharged into streams and lagoons.

The AquaFish program works in countries where the need is great, and where
the challenges can be even greater. Research has been delayed by outbreaks
of flu, wiped out by tsunamis, and destroyed by civil war. “We lost our entire
operation in Rwanda during the genocides of the 1990s,” Egna said. “Some of
our research partners were murdered; it was very, very sad.”

The research that could be salvaged from Rwanda was later moved to Kenya,
where aquaculture is creating new employment opportunities, especially for
women. Though fishponds are owned almost exclusively by men, Kenyan women are
increasingly involved in operations, including feeding, fertilization and predator
control; and women now predominate in processing and marketing fish.

Increased employment for women is part of the focus of an AquaFish project
in Cambodia, where research partners are developing new local markets for fish
paste made from low-value small fish that would otherwise be used for animal
feed. Fish paste in Southeast Asia can be compared to cheese in the U.S and
Europe; it comes in many varieties and is used in many regional dishes. Expanding
this niche market creates employment for women in the manufacture and sales
of these locally distinct “Cambodian cheeses.” In addition, AquaFish partners
in the Mekong Basin are finding ways to separate pint-size fish species from
juveniles of larger, more valuable fish species to protect populations of commercially
important wild fish.

The AquaFish program reaches people where and how they live, and is therefore
distinctive among most other international aid programs. “Most organizations
see aquaculture as a positive choice,” Egna said, “but they don’t know how
to build a system that includes environmental protection and market realities,
a system that takes into consideration the microeconomics of family and community.”

The AquaFish program exemplifies OSU’s outreach to the global community, according
to Sonny Ramaswamy, dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences. “Where people
have meaningful work and enough to eat, they engage more easily in education
and democracy. The AquaFish program connects research, education, and Extension
in developing countries, on the ground, for the benefit of local people. It
is an idea that has grown out of the land grant tradition and it works.”