Overview of China Tilapia Industry

Overview of China Tilapia Industry

General introduction

Tilapia (Oreochromis) is a warm water and fresh water fish species. The ideal living temperature of tilapia is 25℃-32℃, best at 28℃-32℃. The growth will slow down at 20℃, and the fish stops eating at 16℃, begins to die around 14-13℃.

The original distribution of tilapia is Africa. Now this white-meat fish species is widely farmed in over 75 countries and areas around the world. The attributes which makes tilapias especially Nile tilapia (O. niloticus) so suitable for fish farming are their general hardiness, great tolerance to adverse environmental conditions, ease of breeding, rapid growth rate, ability to efficiently convert organic and domestic wastes into high quality protein, and good taste.

China is by far the biggest tilapia producer. Since 1997, tilapia production in China has exceeded 50% of the world tilapia production.

In 1957, the first species of tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) was introduced to China from Vietnam. Since then, several tilapia species such as blue tilapia (O. aureus) and different strains of Nile tilapia (O. niloticus) have been introduced to China. From the early 1980’s, tilapia farming in China started to grow rapidly in response to the introduction of new strains, success in all-male tilapia production and improvement in both nursing and grow-out technologies. Chinese tilapia production rose tenfold to 1.13 million tons from 1989 to 2007.

The tilapia production of China peaked at 2007, and dropped due to the loss during the cold winter in January, 2008, and then the production started to recover in the following months. Tilapia markets have been Influenced by the difficult economic situation since the global financial crisis occurred in the late 2008. The shrunk exports orders and price held the growth of the China tilapia production last year. The China tilapia production statistics of 2009 hasn’t come out, but it could be expected at an output close to 1million tons.

Main tilapia farming areas in China

In China, tilapia is mainly farmed in the southern provinces, especially Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan and Fujian. In 2007, the four provinces produced 998,000 tons of tilapia, 90% of the total national production. Guangdong is the biggest tilapia farming province and it produces about 50% tilapia in China.

Till now, the tilapia farming area of Guangdong is about 650,000mu(1ha=15mu), and it concentrates in two areas - the western Guangdong area and Pearl River Delta area. Maoming (220,000mu) and Zhanjiang (100,000mu) are the two major tilapia farming places in the western Guangdong. The main representatives of Pear River Delta area are Guangzhou (110,000mu) and Zhaoqing (600,00mu).