Aquaculture for African smallholders

Small scale aquaculture, Integrated farming, Aquaculture systems, Appropriate technology, Malawi, Agribusiness,

Stabbing News: Articulating Crime Statistics in the Newsroom

There is a comprehensive body of scholarly work regarding the way media represent crime and how it is constructed in the media narrative as a news item. These works have often suggested that in many cases public anxieties in relation to crime levels are not justified by actual data. However, few works have examined the gathering and dissemination of crime statistics by non-specialist journalists and the way crime statistics are gathered and used in the newsroom. This article seeks to explore in a comparative manner how journalists in newsrooms access and interpret quantitative data when producing stories related to crime. In so doing, the article highlights the problems and limitations of journalists in dealing with crime statistics as a news source, while assessing statistics-related methodologies and skills used in the newsrooms across the United Kingdom when producing stories related to urban crime

Factors influencing fish prices in southern Malawi.

Abstract Nine markets in the Southern Region of Malawi were studied. The prices of 79 separate purchases were compared for market type, species, form of preservation, total length, distance of retail market from the capture fishery of origin, and distance of retail market from the main commercial center of Blantyre. Interviews with retailers and consumers were conducted to help interpret price data and better understand marketing procedures. Average prices were significantly higher in urban than in rural markets. Fresh fish were found to fetch higher prices in rural but not in urban markets. In neither type of market, a premium was paid for a particular species group or for larger fish. The implications for aquaculture development in Malawi are discussed.

2000: The evolution of aquaculture in African rural and economic development

Abstract In Africa, aquaculture has developed only recently and so far has made only a small contribution to economic development and food security. We review developments and identify constraints to the expansion of aquaculture in economic and rural development at the continental, national and farm levels. Past development initiatives failed to achieve sustainable increases in production. In contrast, a growing number of smallholder farmers in many countries have been adopting and adapting pond aquaculture to their existing farming systems and slowly increasing their production efficiency. An evolutionary approach that builds on a fusion of local and outside participation in technology development and transfer appears more likely to produce fish production systems that are more productive and more environmentally and socially sustainable in the long term

African aquaculture: Realizing the potential

Despite 40 years of research and development, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, aquaculture is struggling to realize its high biophysical potential in Africa. Hampered by ineffective institutional arrangements and donor-driven projects, the substantial gains in desperately needed food security and economic growth predicted by development agencies have generally not been achieved. Nevertheless, African aquaculture has demonstrated its competitiveness, producing fishes that feed low on the food chain in a range of well-adapted, environmentally friendly and profitable farming systems that meet the needs of a broad spectrum of user-groups. Key constraints to broader growth include lack of good quality seed, feed and technical advice; poor market infrastructure and access; and weak policies that, rather than accelerate, impede expansion, largely by emphasizing central planning over private sector initiative. If African aquaculture is to make substantial and much needed contributions to the continent's development, government policy should attempt to facilitate the alleviation of key constraints and rely more heavily on commercial investments to lead future growth. Evidence to date indicates that a pragmatic business approach focusing on small and medium-scale private enterprises would produce more benefits for more people than centrally planned and government led development projects.

Fish culture

Although Egyptians were rearing the tilapia Oreochromis niloticus in artificial ponds nearly 4,000 years ago, the African continent, no tradition of fish culture. In the early twentieth century, niloticus in artificial unlike Asia, has aquaculture was still virtually unknown there. The first attempts to develop it date back to the 1940s.These initial attempts were part of a broader goal to diversify the sources of animal protein in order to promote the food self-sufficiency of rural populations. When pilot tests with tilapia at the Kipopo station created in 1949 in the former Belgian Congo yielded promising results, colonial administrators proceeded with expanding these activities. By the end of the 1960s, there were a number of such research/demonstration stations dotted across the continent: Djoumouna (Congo), Landjia (Central African Republic), Foumban (Cameroon), Bouaké (Côte d’Ivoire), Sagana (Kenya), Anamalazaotra & Ampamaherana (Madagascar), Kanjasi (Uganda), Chilanga (Zambia), Henderson (Zimbabwe), and Domasi (Malawi).The first tests conducted at these stations involved species that have now been abandoned because of poor yields: Coptodon zillii, Coptodon rendalli, Sarotherodon galilaeus, Oreochromis mossambicus and Oreochromis macrochir. It took until the 1970s for breeders to take notice of the zootechnical performance of Oreochromis niloticus and its hybrids with various neighbouring species, as they far outclassed that of most other tilapias. It was also during this time that other species with fish culture potential began to be identified: O. aureus, O. andersonii, Sarotherodon melanotheron, the African sharptooth catfish (Clarias gariepinus), the African boneytongue (Heterotis niloticus) andthealien common carp (Cyprinus carpio)