Domestic production of fish fails to meet demand, Bay fishing grounds remain unidentified
Fisheries department officials say that the country will only be able to fulfil the population’s demands for fish when fishermen modernise their fishing practices in internal waters and the government obtains better equipment so that the potential new fishing grounds in the Bay of Bengal can be exploited.
The country’s landscapes are dotted with 26 lakh ponds butonly five per cent of them have been brought under improved aquaculture practices, they said.
Fisheries department statistics showed that the domestic production of fish stood at 30.60 lakh tonnes in 2010-2011 falling short of the demand for 32.72 lakh tonnes.
The fishing sector provides 60 per cent of the population’s need for animal protein and that on average annual fish intake per person was 18.94 kilograms rather than the needed 20.44 kg.
Syed Arif Azad, director general of fisheries, told New Age that the government had been trying to boost fish production to meet the growing domestic demand.
Over 95 per cent of all the ponds across the country produced fish using traditional methods with limited production, he said.
He said the country’s fish cultivators were not capable of commercially producing fish from their ponds.
The fisheries DG said the government, under a project financed by Islamic Development Bank and Malaysia, had been working to procure a research vessel for the following year that could work in the Bay of Bengal.
After getting the research vessel, Bangladesh would be capable of identifying the proper fishing grounds in the bay, he added.
Fisheries officials told New Age that although the sector had been playing an important role in the national economy, all governments had failed to develop the sector appropriately.
As natural fishing grounds in the rivers continued to shrink, fish farming in the ponds and floodplains should be expanded by both the private and public sectors, they said.
The government should increase fisheries ministry manpower at upazila and union levels in order to motivate the fishermen to go for fish farming using modern technology, they said.
M. Akhtaruzzaman, professor at the institute of nutrition and food science of Dhaka University, said that the Bay of Bengal was an unlimited source of fish and the government should explore other species of fish in the sea to meet the domestic demand for animal protein.
Mohammad Mamun Chowdhury, associate professor of fisheries department at Dhaka University, said that the government should also search for more fishing grounds in the bay.
He said the surveys undertaken around 40 years ago had demarcated four fishing grounds in the Bay of Bengal – south patches, southwest of south patches, east swatch of no-ground and swatch of no-ground – and no new grounds had been found till today.
He also suggested that the authorities should make a stock assessment of fishes in the riverine and marine areas and ensure proper management of the fishing sector.
According to fisheries department, there are 272 species of fresh water fish and 511 sea fish, including indigenous and exotic species, found in Bangladesh.
-With New Age input
