FISH SUFFICIENCY IN NIGERIA

Nigeria last week took delivery of a deep sea vessel constructed by Remomtowa Holdings for the Nigerian Institute of Oceanography and Marine Research at a ceremony witnessed by the first lady,  Dame  Patience Jonathan in Gdansk, Poland.



The Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, took time out to field questions on the government’s policy on fisheries and the deep sea vessel which he said will allow the country do deep marine research, exploit and optimize the vast amount of fish resource that the country has.

An excerpt from the interview conducted at the Sheraton Hotel  Gdansk, Poland is presented here by Jimoh Babatunde.

On the economic impact of the vessel

First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan being welcomed  by Mr. Roman Kinda, Vice Chairman of Remontowa Holding and Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Adesina Akinwumi to the christening of ‘RV BAYAGBON’
First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan being welcomed by Mr. Roman Kinda, Vice Chairman of Remontowa Holding and Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Adesina Akinwumi to the christening of ‘RV BAYAGBON’
If you look at Nigeria’s
capacity for producing fish it is enormous, as we don’t have any business importing fish. Fish do not grow on sand but in water and the country is blessed with abundant amount of water.

We have lakes; creeks, rivers and Atlantic Ocean all fill with different kinds of fishes. We also have diversity of fishes in our waters. So what we are trying to do is to optimise because for a long time we could not take advantage of our deep sea fishing resources as there was no vessel to do so.

For example, we have abundant stock of shrimps in our water and Drift Fish and large Lantern Fish populations that we can actually also use to make our fish feed which is equally important as we import most of our feeds right now because Nigeria never had vessel to do that.

This vessel will allow Nigeria go into the territorial water, deep sea and really harvest the resources we have. For quite a long time, it has been a lot of foreign fish vessels that actually come in and take advantage of all these varieties of fish that we have in our sea.

I think Mr. President made a very good decision here to pay for Nigeria to acquire this particular vessel and beyond that, if you look today with fishes resources and marine resources, you have a lot of climate change, the weather is changing, the temperature is changing, the diversity of fish you have is changing and we need to be able to do research on that.

So the vessel we  will also allow us to do marine research to understand the dynamics of the ocean, to understand the diversity of species we have,  take a good stock of them, to be able to have better environmental and ecological management of our marine resource. So it a very important vessel we have here.

On the fight with importer of rotten fish
I have said that nobody will be allowed to poison Nigerians or to bring in rotten fish into the country. We are determined as a government to  protect consumers.

The days of fishy business in Nigeria are gone. We have to develop our fishing industry; we can not just be dependent on import of fish from others. God did not make a mistake when he gave us the Atlantic Ocean, and those lakes we have.

It is only a prodigal person that will have some resources and will not use it and instead be looking at what others have.

What we have decided to do this time is that we will promote within Nigeria a lot of production of aquaculture. We have tilapia, cat fish to all range of fishes that we will promote. We will promote a lot of farm estate, cage culture within some of our rivers so that we can produce a lot of our own cultured fish.

It is not just something we are talking about, we are doing it already, we started by doing the nation’s first ever registration of fish farmers.

Today we know who they are as we registered them, registered their boats, we registered their nets so that they can fish properly and be identified and they can also fish in other territorial waters of other countries and people will know them. There is no way registered fishermen will use  their boats for piracy or things like that, it is very important.

Last year we started by distributing a lot of fish feeds to our fish farmers. We gave each fish farmer five bags of 15kg of fish feeds at 50% subsidy. We also provided them with fingerlings in ten states of the country and for those doing artisanal fishing in just about five nautical mile of the territorial water, we gave them last year sinkers, floaters, nets and insulated boxes among others free of charge.

Just last year alone that we started, these farmers produced about $10m worth of fish and that is great to start, but that is not our target , our goal is for Nigeria to produce up to a million metric tons of fish by 2017.

We want to do roughly 250,000 metric tons of table size fish per year; we also want to do about 1.25billion metric tons of fingerlings, and juveniles per year. Also fish feed is very important and our goal as a government is to do roughly about 400, 000 metric tons of fish feed per year.

We also want to add value to our fish, maybe about 100,000 metric tons of value added fish. We are doing quite well in regards to that, today the fish farm estates are being revived.

I have seen that all the fishing terminals that we have in Igbokoda, Kirikiri light terminals are taken over by oil companies. They are using them for oil which was not what they were built for, they were built for fishing and we are determined that they are revamped and put to proper use which is fishing.

In addition to that, we are working now with a number of private sector agents to do large scale Tilapia and aquaculture production projects in the country.

There is a group in Nigeria, young guys called Danladi and Eric. Smarts guys out of Harvard, came back to Nigeria and they run a company that is already in Epe putting up a 10,000metric tones annual fish production , it is going to be the largest aquaculture investment in Africa by these young Nigerians.

We want to do that all across the country. As far as I am concern those countries we are importing fish from are not blessed by God more than us, we just have to get smarter by using our resources.

So we are going to work closely with the oil companies to make sure that we do not have spillages and if they occur they clean up the mess they create, because when they create such a mess it affects the lives of fishing folks.

So we are going to pay a lot of attention to the ecological consequences of those things as there is no free lunch anywhere, if you create pollution, you clean up the mess you created as well as compensate the communities involved.

We are going to hold them liable for creating such mess, because livelihood is more than oil. People do not drink oil, people eat food.

On projection for fish sufficiency in Nigeria
As you know we are spending roughly N127 billion importing fish and that does not make any sense and what we have decided to do is to have 4-5 years trajectory on how we are going to replace that.

The first part of it is the target we have set that over 4-5 years we should produce one million metric tons of  table size fish and that will put us at 70% self sufficient . I can leave the rest 30% as people do need diversity of fish.

The only thing I will not accept is for Nigeria to be totally dependent on others for fish when we have water we are not making use of , so that is the goal we have set for ourselves.

To get there we will need to have fish feeds,to get the fish feeds we are doing it in two ways. The first is using local resources for fish feeds.

Fish feeds account for 70% of the cost of raising fish, so if you can reduce the cost of fish feeds, you can actually reduce the cost of fish and we are doing that now at the Nigerian Institute of Oceanography and Marine Research in Lagos. They have new fish feed plant which allows us to use cassava to replace a lot of the imported fish feeds we have in the country. It will reduce the cost of producing fish.

Another thing in this vessel that we have acquired is that it will allow us to harvest a lot of lantern and drift fish which are used for fish feeds, so the cost of fish feeds will go down significantly during that particular period of time.