SHAS­TRI BOODAN

There has been a big in­crease in de­mand for farm-raised tilapia since the start of the year. Sales at the Sug­ar­cane Feeds Cen­tre (SFC) in Long­denville have in­creased from 500 pounds to 2,000 pounds a week.SFC project di­rec­tor Suresh Ben­ny told the T&T Guardian con­sumers had been buy­ing more of the farmed-raised fish be­cause of con­cerns about pol­lu­tion fol­low­ing the oil spills last month.

Ben­ny said there had been in­creas­ing de­mand for the tilapia since last year af­ter the Min­istry of Food Pro­duc­tion em­barked on a pro­mo­tion cam­paign and in­tro­duced ini­tia­tives to open more mar­kets for lo­cal farm­ers.There is now an arrange­ment in place where the SFC is pur­chas­ing tilapia from farm­ers and pro­cess­ing and mar­ket­ing the fish.The SFC is cur­rent­ly sell­ing tilapia di­rect­ly to cus­tomers at $15 a pound. Arrange­ments have not yet been made to sup­ply the farm raised fish to su­per­mar­kets.

Ben­ny said there were plans to boost pro­duc­tion and farm­ers with idle ca­pac­i­ty might soon start ramp­ing up to meet the grow­ing de­mand.He added there had been a lev­el­ling off of ma­rine fish­eries and aqua­cul­ture was ex­pect­ed to gen­er­ate more than 50 per cent of the glob­al de­mand for fish by 2015.