USSEC – India’s aquaculture team participated in a national conference, “Strategies for Bridging Yield Gaps in Fisheries and Aquaculture” on March 24-25.  USSEC – Feed/ Soy Meal Program Director Dr. P. Emmanuel Vijay Anand and R. Umakanth, USSEC Aquaculture Consultant – India, were invited to contribute to this two day event organized by the National Fisheries Development Board, the Asian Fisheries Society (Indian Branch) and the College of Fisheries (Mangalore).  About 150 participants from 17 different Indian provinces attended the conference.  Dr. Anand gave the lead presentation, which discussed strategies for India to increase its aquaculture yields; he also facilitated several sessions to elicit recommendations that will be presented to the Indian government.  Mr. Umakanth presented a strong message talking about how the contributions of aquaculture and fisheries’ organizations will make the industry more successful.  These collective messages are aimed at helping people to consider how U.S. soy can help them work toward improving productivity across India.  Additionally, the USSEC team was asked to moderate a few sessions and serve as experts on industry-research deliberations which provided USSEC with an opportunity to promote soy-based aquaculture technologies.

USSEC has indentified Indian freshwater fish aquaculture as a potential avenue for new soy use.  In 2006, freshwater aquaculture in India used very little soy-based feed but the industry has since been successful in generating annual soy meal use of 400 thousand metric tons (TMT) for both fish and shrimp feeds in the country.  Dr. Anand states that this has been a classic model for USSEC to tackle a “zero market,” suitably converting it to derive more “soy tons” as returns.  He adds that it is high time that India focuses a little more on improving aquaculture yields and efficiently uses its resources so as to use its protein production potential in a better manner.  India currently ranks second in global aquaculture production, but there is a strong likelihood that Vietnam and Indonesia will soon supersede India.