Remi Ahmed is the Managing Director/CEO, Choice Fisheries Company Ltd. In this interview with Charles Okonji, he disclosed some of the issues bedeviling the sector’s growth over the past three decades. Excerpts:

Knowing that Nigeria has a huge deficit in fishery how does your involvement in aquaculture and that of your colleagues help augment the huge import bill of fish?

I started the modern aquaculture and fishery in this country when I was working for CHI, the makers of Caprison and Chivita. In the plant owned by CHI, we were producing 400 tons per annum and all of a sudden the whole thing went down and we were struggling to get half of that produced.  When you talk of the aquaculture level or production in the fishery industry in this country today, we don’t have good data system, but like what the Minister have been quoting that we are producing 0.7billion metric ton per annum.

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What is the actual need?

If you take look at our population today, it is over 200 million, and this very important to fish production and consumption. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended that an average person should eat 20 kilograms of fish annually. If we have to eat up to 20 kilograms of fish on the average, then we should be aiming at producing up to 4.4 million metric ton per annum, but at the moment, we are only producing 700,000 tons per annum.

You could see the deficit. Just like I introduced on what we were producing on only one plant and that is CHI in 1996 up to the year 2001. But all of a sudden it just went down. This mishap was as a result of poor policy implementation and management pattern.

We have been agitating for proper policy framework and implementation in the sector but to no avail. Though I have been striving to get involved with the constituted committee in several occasions when the policy are been drafted for aquaculture in this country. We have been canvassing for what we call road stock bank. What we mean by road stock banking is where you get a very veritable parent stock of fish. And when you produce with it, it will grow faster and bigger, it will be decisively free and everything will be alright. You convert the feeds very well.

When I was with CHI, the feed we were using was not imported, we produced it ourselves and majorly from our factory waste, and this was because the plant was into production of chicken. A lot of broiler, drenched daily, produced daily as well as shrimps bill which we used to the produce for export. So from this a lot of waste is generated, which includes the chicken blood, intestine, the head and so on gets into our feeds.

The growth I can tell you is that in 16 weeks, we normally have 1.2kg by the year 2001 when the stakeholders were canvassing for the so-called broods’ stock bank, which is not yet there. It is not easy for a practitioner to go into research of rearing broods stock because, a lot of inputs go into it, right from selection, taking good ones and discard the bad ones and so on. Like I used to tell people in those days, when we were producing fingerlings (baby fishes), the last badge we normally flush it into the gutter.

I challenge all the fish farmers in Nigeria today, nobody is doing that. These are the ones we know will not perform very well in terms of growth, and they the ones that will attract infections and diseases. For such stuck, all of them are been stocked and what we have for it is not encouraging. However, in the same period of 16weeks we normally have 1.2kg but at present, we boast getting up to 400gram.

This ugly trend has continued until we start believing that made in Nigeria feed is not good enough, then we went into massive importation foreign fish meal. As you can see the cost of bringing it down to the country pushes up the market prices of locally grown fish.

Again, the quality of most these imported feeds is not what the manufacturers are claiming. Most of them claim that feed conversion ratio of 1:0 and when you carry out trial test on them you will discover that majority of them will fail the confirmatory test, and some of them are very comfortable in this feed conversion ratio of 1:3 which is to say, if you give 1.3kg then you can only realise 1kg of flesh. Whereas, when I was doing it at CHI, we achieved 980 gram, I normally have 1kg flesh. I proved it in France and it was seen as a black man doing miracle. So, all these imported feeds kept coming into the country, but businessmen kept importing and kept making business out of it.  They don’t care whether the feed is capable of growing fish or not. I remember the top breeder plants in Lagos have gone underground. What killed this plant is imported feeds. If you see these feeds, it looks like tablet you can swallow, it is very neat.

What is its nutritional content?

It is not suitable for catfish. It will always lead to low productivity and loss of funds at the long run.

What is the name of the fish company that went underground?

Ben Harley. It was at Ijora, but crashed as a result of bad fish meal that was imported and the company went into debt. Though, it was doing very well before the advent of massive importation of foreign fish feed.