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The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the Norwegian Embassy in Bangkok, provides master’s and Ph.D. degree scholarships for qualified students from the Least Developed Countries in Asia to study at Asian Institute of Technology (AIT). In 2012, an additional of up-to 40 master’s degree scholarships will also be made available for students from Myanmar.

The main purpose of the scholarships program is to strengthen capacity of institutions in the least developed countries of Asia, particularly of South and Southeast Asia in the fields of study in Rural and Regional Development Planning, Natural Resources Management, Gender and Development Studies, Energy, Agricultural and Systems Engineering, Environmental Management, Water Engineering Management and disaster preparedness and management. Please visit AIT’s website for more information.

The Sultanate of Oman, with a coast line of 2092 km, pristine at that, and a large extent of land area is embarking on an ambitious aquaculture development program, primarily coastal, for food security and generation of employment opportunities as well as earning export income, targeting the adjacent countries in the region. The government has already taken many preliminary steps towards this development strategy and is determined to make it sustainable and environmentally friendly and most of all not repeat the mistakes that had occurred, too often elsewhere.

Among the steps taken to meet its strategic plans it has already identified coastal sites in eight regions, having taken into consideration all relevant climatic, topographical, water quality characteristics and social issues, to be allocated for aquaculture development in each, and made this information available in the Atlas of Suitable Sites for Aquaculture Projects, Sultanate of Oman. In addition, the government has custom built a state of the art Aquaculture Center, which will coordinate the envisaged activities and act as the main research provider, including demonstration units, and proceeded to formulate guidelines for prospective investors to bit for the proposed sites, spelt out in the Investment Guidelines. The aquaculture centre has proceeded to prepare and distribute information profile booklets on species suitable for the designated areas.

As a prelude the Sultanate of Oman convened the first ever conference on aquaculture, “International Conference on Sustainable Aquaculture Development in the Sultanate of Oman- Investment Opportunities”, which brought together specialists in various sectors from all over the globe (Australia, Italy-FAO, Norway, US, UK, New Zealand, Vietnam etc.), prospective local and foreign investors on 10/11th of December in Muscat. The aquaculture development strategy was floated at this Conference. The Conference was presided by His Excellency the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries Wealth, Dr Fuad Jaffer Al-Sajwani, and the government’s commitment to the proposed development was most evident by the fact that his Excellency was in attendance throughout the two days of the conference and led the final discussions sessions. The keynote speaker at the conference was the former Director General of NACA, Professor Sena S De Silva, who spoke on “Current trends in commercial aquaculture in Asia & relevance to emerging aquaculture nations”.

FAO has published technical guidelines on the use of wild fish as feed in aquaculture to support sections of FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (CCRF) addressing responsible fisheries management and aquaculture development. The objective of these guidelines is to assist those concerned to ensure both aquaculture growth and equitable and sustained use of available fish stocks. The guidelines are available for free download.

The guidelines cover a number of issues relevant to the use of wild fish in feeds in aquaculture, ranging from ecosystem and environmental impacts, ethical issues and responsible use of fish as feed, aquaculture technology and development, and statistics and information needs for management. However, issues relating fisheries management are not covered, as these have been considered within separate sets of guidelines related to fisheries management and there exist several sets of technical guidelines on the sustainable management of fisheries and several continuing initiatives to improve sustainable management of fisheries which inter alia would also apply to feed-fish fisheries.

These guidelines are intended to be flexible and capable of evolving as circumstances change or as new information becomes available. Please feel free to send your comments/observations to Mohammad.Hasan ‘at’ fao.org for consideration in preparation of the next edition.

FAO. Aquaculture development. 5. Use of wild fish as feed in aquaculture. FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries. No. 5, Suppl. 5. Rome, FAO. 2011. 79p.

The two-day meeting was held in the Board Room of Hotel Motimahal, Mangalore, India on 19-20 November 2011. The meeting was attended by all the AG members including representatives from:

• OIE-AAHSC (Dr Barry Hill, President).
• OIE Regional Representation for Asia and the Pacific (Dr Hnin Thidar Myint).
• FAO (Dr Rohana Subasinghe).
• DAFF Australia (Drs Ingo Ernst and Brett Herbert).
• SEAFDEC AQD (Dr Edgar Amar).
• NACA (R&D Manager Dr CV Mohan and Aquatic Animal Health Programme Coordinator Dr Eduardo Leaño).
• Private sector (Dr Siow Foong Chang, Merck Animal Health).
• Aquatic animal health expert from the region (Prof. Timothy Flegel, Thailand).

Also in attendance are the Director General of NACA (Dr. Ambekar Eknath), two co-opted members from Mangalore College of Fisheries (Drs. Indrani Karunasagar and Kalkuli Shankar), and guest participants from EU-ASEM platform project (Drs. John Bostock, Sandra Adams and Kim Thompson).

The meeting managed to accomplish the TOR set for the AG which includes reviewing the disease situation in Asia, considering the recent changes made to OIE global standards, revising the list of diseases for listing in the regional QAAD reporting system, assessing the progress made against the various elements contained in the Asia Regional Technical Guidelines on responsible movement of live aquatic animals, updating the regional resource centers, and developing recommendations and action points for the consideration of NACA and NACA Member Governments.

Detailed meeting report will be developed by the Secretary of the AG (NACA Aquatic Animal Health Program Coordinator) and circulated to all AG members for review/approval. The final report will be made available to all governments, published on NACA website and formally submitted to regional and international organizations (e.g. OIE AAHSC, FAO, SEAFDEC, ASEAN). OIE places considerable value to the NACA AG meeting report and recommendations and it gets placed before the OIE-AAHSC annual meetings.

The Phase III report of the Shrimp Price Study is available for download. This study is a continuation of “Evaluation of the impact of the Indian Ocean tsunami and US anti-dumping duties on the shrimp farming sector of South and South-East Asia”, a study conducted by Network of Aquaculture Centres in Asia-Pacific (NACA) in 2006, with the aim of assessing the impact of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and of the introduction of anti-dumping duties on the shrimp farming sectors of countries in the Asian region, with special focus on the effect that these unforeseen events had on shrimp prices and livelihoods of the stakeholders. The project was conducted in three countries selected as representatives for countries affected by the anti-dumping duties, the tsunami, and neither event respectively.

The first-round study, while giving an insight on the impact of the Indian Ocean tsunami and US anti-dumping, also highlighted the need for continuous collection of price data from a wider range of stakeholders in the supply chain in order to do a thorough evaluation of the health of the industry and to identify the interventions to be made to increase the sustainability of the sector. Phase II (January 2008 to June 2009) and Phase III (Current study) are follow-up studies based on the recommendations derived from the initial study. The present study is the 3rd phase of this extended study and aims to update the social and economic trends in the shrimp farming sector investigated during the previous phases.

This report is based on the data collected from the 3 representative countries, Vietnam, Indonesia and Bangladesh from July 2009 - November 2010.