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35. Community based fish culture

Full Title:

Community-Based Fish Culture in Irrigation Systems and Seasonal Floodplains

Download project proposal [PDF 171Kb]

This is a proposal for a 5-year interdisciplinary action-research project with the overall aim of enhancing the productivity of seasonally occurring floodwaters for the improved and sustained benefit of the livelihoods of the poor. The main activities of the project are to be conducted in seasonal floodplain and irrigation areas of two benchmark river basins (Indus-Ganges and Mekong) and one non-benchmark basin (Niger), with the option to expand the activities into the Senegal basin in the latter part of the project. The underlying assumption of the approach is that seasonal waterbodies (over-flooded crop fields, or in ponds and reservoirs in irrigation schemes), can be communally managed by all stakeholders under equitable and sustainable sharing arrangements. Recent on-farm demonstrations using such a community-based approach in Vietnam and Bangladesh have confirmed the feasibility of this approach.

During the rainy season in extensive river floodplains and deltaic lowlands, floods lasting several months render the land unavailable for crop production for several months each year. This water are considerably underutilized in terms of managed aquatic productivity. This raises the opportunity to enclose parts of these floodwater areas to produce a crop of specifically stocked aquatic organizms aside from the naturally occurring “wild” species that are traditionally fished and are not affected by the culture activity, overall resulting in more high-quality, nutrient-dense food production and enhanced farm income for all stakeholders, notably the poor.

The outputs of the project will provide the following:

•           User-verified technical options for integrating fish and other living aquatic resources into irrigation systems and seasonal floodplains.
•           Demonstrated and locally rooted institutional options for sharing benefits of integrating fish and other living aquatic resources into irrigation systems and seasonal floodplains.
•           A validated participatory diagnostic and a stakeholder-involving diffusion approach for community-based fish cultured in shared water bodies.
•           Improved capacity of NARES for supporting community-based fish culture in shared water bodies.

The approach would help mitigate the trend of declining inland capture fisheries production, with increasing prices of fish, rendering these less affordable to the poor. For example, in Bangladesh alone, there are 3 million hectares of medium and deep-flooded areas, out of which about 1.5 million hectares are estimated to be suitable for community-based fish culture. If this approach is adopted in only 50 percent of these areas, annual fish production will increase by 450,000 tons (in addition to the presently produced 60,000 tons of wild fish caught) at an approximate value of US$340 million and will be of benefit to an estimated population of 6.7 million (2.7 million of whom are landless and functionally landless). Similar opportunities are seen for floodplain and deltaic systems in other countries in Asia and Africa.