Water is recognized as a key limiting resource for the coming millennium. Optimal productivity of water and lands is becoming a critical issue. This is even more pronounced in drought-prone areas of Africa.
One way to increase resources productivity effectively is to integrate irrigation and aquaculture, for example by developing and enhancing fisheries inirrigation small water bodies, by reusing irrigation water leaving irrigation plots for feeding fish ponds, by stocking fish in irrigation canals, by building ponds in adjacent water-logged areas unsuitable for agriculture, by using crop by-products as nutrient inputs for farmed fish, and and by fertilizing irrigated vegetable gardens with pond mud deposits and irrigating these gardens with fertilized pond water.
At the household level, integrated irrigation-aquaculture (IIA) contributes to helps establish food security, balanced nutrition and increased incomes.
Although both irrigation and aquaculture are rather well known technologies, their deliberate merger is relatively new to Africa where adapted techniques for IIA field application have still to be developed.
There is need to exchange information on IIA and to identify appropriate types of integration for the various agro-ecological zones found across the Region. The 1997 FAO-funded mission (Coche, 1998) established the benefits of developing an IIA Network and identified four potential countries to participate in a first phase of 18 months minimum[1].
The IIA farming system fits well into the water control and diversification components of the FAO Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS). IIA activities could become prominent in this Programme which is now being developed in several Sub-Saharan countries.
Except in Zambia where IIA has already been well received, the other countries have not yet adopted IIA in their farming systems. There is however great potential for IIA in the Region and the SPFS could demonstrate it in its projects wherever feasible.
Country statements on the status of irrigation, aquaculture and IIA are presented in Annexes 3 to 7. They can be summarized as follows.
[1] During the preparation of
the Workshop, Côte d'Ivoire was added as a potential network member, due
to the presence of WARDA/IVC in the country, this organization's experience in
networking and its interest in IIA-related activities. |