Speech by SMS Dr Koh Poh Koon at AquaSG 2017
Oct 5, 2017
Thank you for inviting me to open the AquaSG 2017 Conference. This event was started in 2015 to create a platform to share ideas and build networks, not just among the industry, but among academia and students as well. Last year, Temasek Polytechnic brought in the Asian Aquaculture Network to provide an even wider reach. Today, I understand that we have about 200 participants from more than 60 organisations joining us at the conference.
Aquaculture is an area with huge potential. We know that wild fish stocks are declining as a result of climate change and overfishing. We also know that global demand is increasing, partly because we are now eating more; secondly, because the world population is increasing. This means that there will be significant opportunities for aquaculture farms that can scale up production in a sustainable way. To capture these opportunities that are going to come before us, there are three areas we should focus on.
Increasing Productivity
First, we need more productive farms. Otherwise, there will just not be enough food for all of us. As a small country, space is our greatest constraint. But we have never let this limit us in our imagination nor our ambitions. In fact, we have always found ways around our spatial constraints. One way is to use technology to overcome these constraints. Twenty to thirty years ago, a lot of the technologies you see today were not available. But today, they are readily available and commercially available. It makes sense for us to take a hard look at how to overcome these constraints with presently available technologies. These constraints apply to many industry sectors, and the improvement in technology is also a way for aquaculture, just like many other industries, to overcome some of these constraints. By leveraging on technology and automation, we will be able to grow more with less.
Some of our farms are leading the way. For instance, Barramundi Asia uses deep sea underwater net-cages to achieve five times the yield of an average coastal fish farm. Land-based Apollo Aquaculture matches this production by using a multi-tier recirculating system. But we need to do more if we really want to capitalise on the opportunities.
Other aquaculture players have invested heavily in technology. Two months ago, I visited a deep-net cage farm in Norway with some of our industry partners. The farm was run by the Leroy Group which is one of Norway’s largest aquaculture players. What we saw was mind-boggling and very impressive. They had automated feeding systems, underwater monitoring cameras and sensors, as well as robotic net washers and harvesters. Almost every part of the operation was automated, so much so that it did not feel like a farm but a factory producing fish. The farm was able to produce up to 9,000 tonnes of salmon a year – much more than the 5,000 to 6,000 tonnes of fish all our fish farms in Singapore produce. And if that number wasn’t impressive enough, imagine this: the amount of production was done by only 10 farm operators! How many farm workers do we have in Singapore? How many farms do we have and how much are we producing? What it shows is that we have a lot of headroom to make ourselves even more productive and even more manpower-lean. The possibilities are there. It is not impossible; the Norwegians have done so.
We can learn from studying how others do things. For example, 70% of the cost of fish production is due to the cost of feeds used, so the automatic remote feeding system is something worth looking at. It allows farmers to monitor how much feed has actually been consumed by fishes. Imagine if the cost of production largely comes from the feed and you don’t know how much the fishes are eating but keep throwing in the feed, then you are just throwing money away. Using technology like this can optimise the amount of feed that is dispensed, and will help reduce both manpower as well as the production cost. I know some of our farmers who went on the trip with me, are considering getting systems like this one to make their processes a lot more evidence-based rather than just guesswork.
Disease Management
The second thing we all should think about, which is also part of the theme of the conference today, is disease management. We need more resilient farms. This conference is very relevant because disease management is crucial. There is no point in intensifying production, having more fish, just to see them all die faster. Imagine if you do not have proper disease management in fish farms and you want to intensify production, you are actually incurring very high business risk. Closer proximity therefore means the fishes are likely to catch disease faster from one another, and not just bacterial infections, but also fungal, viral and parasitic infections as well. Many of you may recall the infectious salmon anaemia virus that devastated Chile’s aquaculture industry back in 2007, it almost wiped out the entire industry in Chile. Such examples that happened elsewhere are important and valuable lessons for us. It serves as a warning to all of us that it can also happen to us here.
How do we overcome some of these challenges? Well, one of the ways is through better collaboration. For instance, research institutes can work with the industry to develop vaccines to increase resilience against specific diseases, which is why today, it is a good thing to have industry, students, academia and regulators here under one roof. I understand that Temasek Polytechnic recently developed an oral vaccine against the iridovirus for seabass and grouper. This oral vaccine can be mixed in fish feed – a considerably more efficient method than the old way of injecting young fish individually, which is less laborious, and less traumatic for the fishes. Quite a few of our local farmers are excited to take part in the field trials, and I hope this project will show us what industry and academia can do together.
Partnerships
This brings me to a third, and related, point – partnerships. As our aquaculture industry matures, we need partnerships between research institutes and industry players to become the norm. There are plenty of synergies if we work collectively to co-create solutions because we have different types of fish we grow here, and our water environment is different, so we really need customised solutions to suit our needs. I am heartened that Temasek Polytechnic will be signing two separate agreements with Blue Aqua International and Oceanus later today to conduct research in aquaculture nutrition and health management. There will also be onsite training opportunities for students at these two farms. We need more of such collaborations to help bring the next generation of tech-based fish farmers into our aquaculture sector.
Let me end by saying that we are entering a very exciting time for the aquaculture industry. The limitation is only in your own imagination. Many companies in other sectors, for example in offshore marine sector, like Sembcorp and Keppel, are looking at using sea-based floating platforms to open up opportunities for vertical farming and offshore fish farming. I think these are areas in which our industry players can continue to work together across different industries to unlock opportunities. I know it is early days, but we have the potential to become a leader in tropical marine aquaculture. If we succeed, it will mean both greater food security for Singapore, more business opportunities for our industry, more exciting options for young people, and of course greater contribution to the rest of the world as well. I think this is something we should all aim for. Let me take the chance to thank you all for coming, and I wish you all a very fruitful conference. Thank you.