Perspectives from the FAO Regional Office for Africa

John Moehl

Regional Aquaculture Officer

Africa Regional Integrated Irrigation and Aquaculture Workshop

Background

Water is recognised as one of the key limiting resources for the new millennium. Areas with once abundant water reserves are now forced to take a close look at rationing, while water-stressed areas are being forced to get by with less and less water. Diminishing supplies and increased demand mean that water use and re-use is a critical issue. It is now clearly imperative that water use be optimized. One form of optimisation is to integrate irrigation and aquaculture (IIA) and develop synergy from this marriage. Aquaculture, generally in the form of fishponds, can stock water for irrigating plant crops or can capture water leaving irrigation schemes. Ponds can also be built in adjacent waterlogged areas not suitable for other crops. By-products from the crops can be used as nutrient inputs for the fish; green manure for composting, spoiled produce and/or by-products such as bran or oil cake as supplemental feeds.

Moreover, at the household level IIA helps establish food security and balanced nutrition by providing a ready source of high protein _ fish. There are indications that, in some communities, families depend upon fishing in ponds or reservoirs to provide food during the "hungry period" when few alternatives are available; the ponds serving as food banks, reserving fish for times of need. For these reasons, aquaculture is an important diversification component of the FAO Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS), which targets enhanced water management.

Although neither irrigation nor aquaculture is a new innovation, their merger in IIA is new and many of the technical details are still being worked out. There is a need to exchange information on IIA and identify the appropriate technologies for the various agro-ecological zones found across the Region.

An IIA Network

Information exchange is a major factor in many areas of development. All too often, access to information, rather than lack of information, is problematic. In 1993, the Working Party on Aquaculture of the Committee for Inland Fisheries for Africa (CIFA) met to review the aquaculture development and research needs in sub-Saharan Africa (reported in CIFA Technical Paper 23). The CIFA paper states "An improved information flow throughout Africa should be created" and "direct access to past and up-to-date information is stressed". To this end, improved aquaculture information exchange was of the highest priority. In addition to proposing an information network, the Working Party identified a number of research programmes to address the Region's needs; one of these programmes was Aquaculture in Irrigation Schemes.

As a result of this proposal, in October 1997 the Inland Water Resources and Aquaculture Service of the FAO Fisheries Department organized an identification mission to Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Zambia and

Zimbabwe to assess the possibilities of establishing an African IIA Network. The mission recommended the organisation of a workshop as a first step for the establishment of this network.

Subsequently, in September 1999, the Agriculture and the Fisheries Department Groups of the FAO Regional Office for Africa, assisted by colleagues from Headquarters, organised an IIA Workshop in Accra, Ghana. The Workshop brought together 32 irrigation and aquaculture technicians from seven countries as well as representatives of related international institutions including: the Regional Association for Irrigation and Drainage (ARID), the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) with its Ecoregional Programme for Humid and Sub-Humid Tropics of Sub-Saharan Africa (EPHTA), and the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA) with its two regional research consortia, the Inland Valley Consortium (IVC) and the Regional Rice Research Network (RRRN) and the International Centre for Living Aquatic Resource Management (ICLARM).

The Workshop assessed the current status of IIA activities, determined information needs, discussed how these could be met through networking and agreed on a proposal for establishing an African IIA Network.

Conclusions

The Workshop reached the following conclusions on the status and relevance of IIA and the establishment of an IIA network:

On Integrated Irrigation-Aquaculture