Photo credit: Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC)
Review: Abdel Rahman El Gamal (Founder of the website)
The inserted photo shows the floating cages of tilapia in Lake Manure (Vanuatu). The original stock of tilapia has been imported from Fiji where subsequent fry importation of red tilapia hybrids came from Thailand in 2007. There are several of commercial operations working in Lake Manure whereas the strain of Genetically Improved Farmed Tilapia (GIFT) and the red tilapia hybrids are cultured in the floating cages.
In the beginning, commercial feed for farmed tilapia was imported from Thailand while the current trend is to depend more on locally manufactured feed made from locally available ingredients such as tusker brewery waste, Vanuatu abattoir meat meal, copra meal, biodiesel plants, flour and rice. It has been claimed that the proper locally manufactured feed formulas proved to be economically feasible.
In general, tilapia is not the desired fish by local fish consumers in Vanuatu who prefer marine fish whereas Asian community is the major consumers of tilapia especially dark fish.
There are damaging cyclones which could seriously threaten the cage farming in the lake. An example of that is the damage caused during the severe Cyclone Pam of 2015 whereas cages were damaged and tons of caged tilapia swept away.
