20/06/2018: Encouraging support through global and government connections

by Clifford Spencer, Aquaculture Without Frontiers

It has been a very busy month for Aquaculture without Frontiers in the UK.

Much activity has been centred around the UK’s new National Aquaculture Centre (NAC), that is co-owned by the UK AwF and for which activity is increasing as the centre’s establishment continues at the Humber Seafood Institute on Grimsby’s Europarc. The other co-owner of the NAC is the GBTF a UN Foundation mandated, not for profit organisation, interested in technology transfer to developing nations.
 

Currently discussions and efforts are taking place around the NAC’s important future IT capacity which is will be run by the GBTF’s David James. David is the holder of a double first in Mathematics from Cambridge University and his previous posting was as IT manager at global giant Nestle’s head office in York in the UK.

The capacity to trigger research of direct relevance to the national aquaculture needs of developing countries, will be a key asset for AwF in the capacity and services of the NAC.

In this respect the NAC’s official academic partner Hull University has global skills as held in their own Hull International Fisheries Institute and separate Institute of Coastal and Estuarine Studies. Only this week the university hosted a visiting delegation to the NAC from the African Union’s own development agency NEPAD, to discuss aquaculture and the surrounding so called blue economy.

It was very interesting listening to the various presentations made by Hull’s considerable research staff during the visit, and even areas such as the potential for integrating marine aquaculture into the increasingly developed marine wind farms, of which Hull’s North Sea hosts and is developing the largest and most efficient in the world.

The host of ground-breaking technologies (from communication to monitoring to farming) that are now already available to assist smallholder aquaculture enterprises through their use in developing countries, is huge. These technologies took on a whole new meaning as the current situation of inland fisheries and aquaculture in continental Africa was explained by the visitors and discussed with the NAC’s directors with the support of Hull University based experts. The fact that for instance virtually all subsistence aquaculture in Africa is unrecorded was emphasised and with that the enormous reliance of local populations on the output of this indigenous small-scale aquaculture.

Read the full article, HERE.

The Aquaculturists
This blog is maintained by The Aquaculturists staff and is supported by the
magazine International Aquafeed which is published by Perendale Publishers Ltd

For additional daily news from aquaculture around the world: aquaculture-news