Integrating agriculture, fisheries and ecosystem conservation: Win-win solutions

Abstract

Integrated Agriculture-Aquaculture (IAA) is essentially diversification of agriculture, leading to synergisms among sub-systems resulting in a higher productivity from land/water area under the farmers' control. One method of achieving this is adding a pond culture component to a farm system, basically to receive and utilize the nutrient inputs from the latter. The second method is physically integrating aquaculture into the other systems by modifying the farm design and operations. More than 30% of the total geographical area in 40 countries covering 9.2 million km2 in Sub-Saharan Africa is suitable for some form of integrated aquaculture. Based on the present production level, it has been projected that 35% of the Africa's increased requirement of fish in 2010 could be met by small scale fish farmers using IAA in just 0.5 % of the total potentially available area.