Seaweed farming in Zanzibar
Earnings from seaweed farming in Zanzibar are exceeding those from fishing and are higher than the minimum wage in Tanzania. Thousands of villagers are now actively farming seaweed and annual production is said to be about 500 tonnes. Interest in seaweed farming began in the 1980s when two companies set up farms in Zanzibar. They failed with one of the local seaweed species, Eucheuma striatum, but are succeeding with a species brought in from the Philippines, E. spinosum. In fact E. spinosum is growing twice as fast as it does in the Philippines, 40g seedlings reach a weight of 600g in three weeks as compared to six weeks in the Philippines. One company, Zaneo Seaweeds, encourages villagers to crow seaweeds on coir roses in the intertidal zones. Initially the idea appealed to women but, once men saw that it offered high returns, they started taking it up also. The other company, Zanzibar Agro-Seaweed Company, has its own farm but also encourages cultivation by local people. After harvesting, the seaweed is sun-dried for three to four days, bagged and exported to Europe and the Far East for processing. Most of it is used to produce binding agents for food products such as hamburgers; It is also used in some toothpastes. FAO's Aquaculture for Local Community Development Programme (ALCOM), based in Zimbabwe, is now surveying other coastal areas as possible sites for seaweed farming. ALCOM PO Box 3730 Harare, ZIMBABWE
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| Format: | News Item biblioteca |
| Language: | English |
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Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation
1993
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10568/49237 http://collections.infocollections.org/ukedu/en/d/Jcta47e/ |
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