Fishery Industry Overview And Development in Bangladesh

According to the report from the Aquaculture Industry, Bangladesh, located in South Asia, has hundreds of criss-cross river systems, spreading all over the rivers, canals, depressions, ponds, lakes, and Hirst, owing inland water sources up to 4.7 million hectares. In the meantime, the marine fishery resources of Bangladesh are also abundant, including 166,000 km2 of National EEZ (exclusive economic zone). Moreover, its unique climate can provide conditions that abound in gifts of nature for aquaculture and fishing industry resource administration, especially the Bay of Bengal located in the southern part of the country, which has just a two-month winter duration. Generally speaking, the temperature always changes from 7 Celsius to 40 Celsius, and the amount of precipitation varies from 1170mm to 4300mm.

Overview of Bangladesh Fishery

With the plentiful fishery resources, the Bangladesh region has a great variety of freshwater and marine fishes and shrimps, including 795 native species and 12 imported species. Besides, from the 2014 FAO Fishery & Aquaculture Bangladesh profile, it also has 10 pearl mussels, twelve edible Chelonians, fifteen crabs, and three different lobsters. Fishery accounted for 3.8% of Bangladesh’s GDP, as 22.76% of total GDP in agriculture. In 2011 – 2012, the quantity of aquatic products was 3.26 million tons, and the aquatic products exported foreign exchange earnings accounted for 2.46% of total foreign exchange receipts in the whole nation. Not only that, the fishery industry also provided about 60% of animal protein consumption in the country, and directly or indirectly supplied aquaculture industry-related work for almost 11% population of Bangladesh.

Fishery Resources and Production

According to the water area, Bangladesh fishery production can be divided into two types – inland fishery production and marine fishery production. According to production mode, fishery production can be divided into inland fishery (open water), marine fishery, and aquaculture (closed water).

²Inland fishery
Inland water area contains pond, river, stream outlet, wetland, benchland, moor, crescent lake brackish water, etc. There are about 260 types of fish and 24 kinds of shrimp. In the early 1960s, inland fishery resources contributed almost 90% of the fishery full production capacity of this country, while with the rapid development of aquaculture, fishery output of open water areas has slow growth, and currently, there are only 29% of fishery yield coming from the inland open water area. But as the below figure shows, Bangladesh, one of the major producers in inland water capture production, still plays a significant part in the world’s inland fishery.

²Marine fishery
With the affluent marine water resources, the Bangladesh Department of Fisheries has evaluated its fishery resources to ensure the maximum sustainable earnings, and deployed vessels with tracing and monitoring systems. Moreover, it owns the largest mangrove protection zone (covering an area of 6,000 km2 land in its territory) that not only benefits abundant fishery and other natural resources but also plays an important role in shrimp or fish seedlings growing and breeding base. In order to manage the reeves shad industry better, its Department of Fisheries made a series of rules: to build five reeves shad protection zones in main breeding sites within the scope of 7,000km2; to set state-level reeves shad protection week in March per year; to carry out parent fish protection at nesting season in October; to strictly limit the mesh size and device type of shad capture; to provide food, financial and ancillary revenue project support for fishermen during forbidden fishing season.

²Aquaculture industry
Dated from the 1970s, Bangladesh fishery, especially aquaculture has owned over eight hundred private hatcheries, 11,000 private nurseries, and about 125 state-owned fry breeding fields (76 hatcheries). The main varieties in hatchery breeding include chub, grass carp, bighead, black carp, cyprinoid, catfish, gourami, and so forth. With the improved extensive form and semi-intensive breeding as two main breeding types, the average output of pond culture is about 4,115kg/hm². In 2011-2012, its total yield of shrimps was almost 252 thousand tons. From the 2014 World Fishery and Aquaculture Report launched by FAO, the gross amount of Bangladesh aquatic products has risen to 3.5 million tons (including around 2 million tons of aquaculture products) from 0.75 million tons nearly thirty years ago, ranking the fourth largest fish producing country. Besides, according to the news from the Department of Fisheries, the annual average growth speed of aquaculture has exceeded 25% in the past five years, and now its annual average aquaculture yield has reached 500 billion Taka.

²Open water area management
In order to protect the natural breeding ground of Cyprinidae fish and other juvenile fish, the Department of Fishery has adopted a series of measures, such as restoring Halda River, building a set of natural resources integrated management system, protecting biological diversity, maintaining residents livelihood of wetland and bench land with the help of projects development, etc. Meanwhile, they have also taken a range of manual intervention steps so as to prevent the aquaculture ecosystem, especially fish and other aquatic biodiversity in open water from degenerating, for example, building refuges and habitat protection for fishes. Over the past 5 years, they have built 566 fish refuges in different water areas, which made the fishery production of these water areas sustainable improvement. On the other hand, river, backwater, and water channel in low-lying place has also been excavated again and again, aiming at ensure breeding migration of fish during the breeding period.

Fish and Fish Products Export Situation

The survey shows there are 162 aquatic product processing plants, therefore, 74 plants have won permission from the European Union. At the same time, HACCP(Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) has also been introduced into fish processing plants to ensure food security. The major importing market of Bangladesh fishery contains European countries, America, and Japan, and total import shares of these three countries account for 98% of its total fishery export volume, and the rest parts are mainly exported to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Besides, its main exporting aquatic products contain frozen shrimp, PUD and P&D prawn, iced fresh, frozen reeves shad, dried fish, fresh fish, sea eel, crab, bit fish, and shrimp products with additional value, and so on.

Key Influence Prospect Forecast of Bangladesh Fishery Industry

For the sake of increasing the exporting earnings of aquatic products, the Bangladesh government a fish feed machine to encourage fish farmers to introduce advanced fish-feeding technology and scientific & nutritional fish feed formula and import high-performance fish-making machines so as to enhance productivity, raise production, and satisfy market demands. From the report of Intrafish on August 23rd, Bangladesh plans to invest 41.4 million dollars for 2016-2017 fishery projects (around 20 relevant development projects to be estimated), aiming at promoting fishery industry development and making its yield up to 450 thousand tons by 2021. As the leading professional fish feed production line and fish feed-making machine manufacturer, Fish Feed Machinery has also contributed and will continue to contribute its share to the Bangladesh fishery development via providing a series of high-quality but low-cost fish feed pellet-making machines to its fish farmers and feed plants.

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