By Nadia Chagnaud and Tim Pickering 

 

 

A four-day field trip to Vanua Levu was made in February to meet with freshwater prawn and tilapia farmers and other stakeholders interesting in developing freshwater aquaculture.

 

The adjustments of the PDA’s parameters and the development of the source code required to create a questionnaire form for farmers were done in collaboration with Phil Bright from SPC’s Statistics and Demography Programme. The 2004 census undertaken by SPC’s Aquaculture Section was the starting point for selecting the most useful questions for determining the status of freshwater aquaculture farms in Fiji. The dropdown menus in the questionnaire avoided handwriting errors. Census results were placed into an Excel spreadsheet that with links to farm coordinates.

 

A visit to Montfort School at Savarekareka and the primary school at Urata village, Cakaudrove Province, gave us an insight to fish farming activities that target food security. Montfort School is an example of a successful tilapia aquaculture programme that provides fish for students every Sunday. In Urata village, the potential pond sites are waiting to be renovated (the old ponds have been neglected).

Ben Ponia (SPC’s Aquaculture Section) and Tim Pickering (USP in Fiji) joined the team near Labasa, Macuata Province to visit tilapia farms in the middle of sugarcane plantations, where farmers have succeeded in collecting water from the river through irrigation.

 Freshwater prawn and tilapia ponds of Mr  Yunus  — an Indo-Fijian freshwater pond farmer — in Nabekavu village. 

A field visit was made to the freshwater pond farm of Mr Yunus. He is a sugarcane farmer who recently decided to try tilapia farming on his plantation, and is now expanding his farm to include freshwater Macrobrachium prawns.

Freshwater prawn farming appears to be a promising possibility for Vanua Levu, with some farmers already receiving orders for prawns from neighbours or customers from Labasa.

It is interesting to note the mutual assistance between farmers in harvesting tilapia. The main problems are the potential pollution of the water source, and river bank logging, which leads to the erosion of land and heavy runoff into rivers.

This fieldwork resulted in an understanding of freshwater farmers’ constraints, successes and needs, and allowed us to test a handy new tool for future freshwater farm censuses.

 

 Workshop in Fiji on freshwater aquaculture   

A one-day workshop on freshwater aquaculture in Fiji was held in February at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Suva, Fiji. The workshop brought together users and future users of geographic information systems, data producers and decision-makers.

Gerald Billings from Fiji’s Fisheries Department, Tim Pickering from USP, Wolf Forstreuter from the Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC), Ben Ponia and Nadia Chagnaud from SPC Noumea hosted the workshop.

Participants came from the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Fisheries and Forests (Suva and Labasa), Ministry of Primary Industry, Ministry of Finance and National Planning (Fiji Islands Bureau of Statistics), USP, SOPAC, Naduruloulou Aquaculture Research Station and SPC Suva.

Ben Ponia gave an overview of aquaculture in the Pacific, highlighting the increasing demand for fish in the region for both food security and income generation. Gerald Billings explained that tilapia and grass carp are now an important added source of protein for inland communities. The average areas of the farms in Fiji were 0.5 ha in 1983 and reached 390 ha in 2007. The need to find more efficient methods of pond site selection was emphasised.

Tim Pickering explained how GIS approaches can help aquaculture managers and described the necessary parameters for a GIS model for freshwater fish farming in Fiji. He mentioned that aquaculture development in many parts of Asia and the Pacific has been limited by poor information dissemination and poor management decisions. Constraints can lead to poor choices being made in locating aquaculture projects. He highlighted the importance of water sources and described the proper soils and topography for tilapia farming. The socioeconomic parameters he listed included, population size (i.e. is the local market large enough?), motivators for farming (i.e. community-based project vs a privately owned sugarcane farmer who is converting to tilapia and prawn), and understanding the potential barriers (e.g. ownership, finance, access to markets).

 

 Wolf Forstreuter gave an exposé on the application of high-resolution GIS backdrops (i.e. high-resolution base maps and/or aerial photos) for resource management. He gave some examples of the benefits of using satellite imagery and data in technical resource management approaches (e.g. multiple images over time, digitalisation of images, creation of thematic maps and applying land use classifications). SOPAC has the capacity to pre-process images and Wolf emphasised the need for cooperation with Pacific Island countries and stakeholders. Nadia Chagnaud described the GIS analyses and categorised factors as being either environmental or socioeconomic. After underlining the need for accurate GPS positions of freshwater farms for planning purposes, she explained how a global investigation  involving the compilation of environmental and socioeconomic data could be used to identify suitable areas for freshwater aquaculture. 

The last workshop presentation was about the personal digital assistant (PDA) with GPS functionalities linking the location of farms with a questionary to the farmers and the use of the GIS platform with export of vector data to Google Earth. The overlay of farms locations on the Google Earth images convinced the public of the pertinence of using the satellite images. 

The first global “positive impact” of this workshop was that decision-makers became aware of the usefulness of GIS tools for planning purposes. The second impact was on data producers, who understood the added value to their data, raising interests such as sharing and updating data and metadata.