The agricultural and food engineering department of the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur will be hosting a two-day workshop called Sustain-Aqua 2007 on sustainability of Indian aquaculture industry' beginning September 28 in an effort to draft a consensus on different policy issues starting from producer to consumer and bankers to environmentalists.
A release issued by IIT said tremendous rise in aquacultural food production in the last decade in India and the world had compensated the decline in production from capture fisheries with production from aquaculture sector, changing the face of coastal areas.
AFED faculty B C Mal was the chairman of the organising committee of Sustain-Aqua 2007.
Shrimp comprised almost 80 per cent share in terms of value of total marine food traded but shrimp farming had led to over-use of environment and pollution from effluents of the shrimp production, causing pathogenic diseases and falling productivity during mid-1990's that nearly killed the industry.
This declined was reversed by successfully curbing diseases but the process revealed the need for co-operation along all stakeholders in the Indian aquaculture industry for a sustainable development model.
The IIT meet would bring together stakeholders on one platform to analyze past actions, synchronize visions and develop strategies for sustainability.
Aquaculture sector problems, its environmental aspects and its management through techniques including image processing & GIS would be explored.
Application of biotechnology for sustainable aquaculture and the economics, finance and management aspects of aquaculture would be explored to work out a sustainable model for aquaculture, said P S Rao, secretary of the technical committee of 'Sustain-Aqua 2007' and AFED faculty at IIT Kharagpur.
Planners, management experts, technologists, engineers, scientists, academicians, researchers and students from government and non-governmental organizations, universities, research institutes, NGOs, consulting consortiums, private enterprises as well as shrimp and fish farmers, processors, exporters were expected to participate, said C K Mukherjee, organising secretary and AFED faculty.
