Situation Analysis of Aquaculture Industry in China

2. Situation Analysis

2.1 Overview of Aquaculture Industry and Aqua feed market

China is growing its aquaculture annually but the growth from the fisheries segment is in downward trend. The China government is favor to aquaculture segment and there are limited resources from sea catching. The aquatic product from aquaculture segment in 2008 was reported at 33,950,000 Mt compared to fisheries aquatic product of 14,650,000 Mt. (China Agriculture Ministry, 2009). The growth of aquaculture and fisheries from year 2004 to year 2008 can be found in appendix 1.

The growth of farm aquatic animal accelerates the growth of aqua feed in China. Obvious, China has increased substantially the aqua feed production to fulfill the need of aquaculture farms. According industry report, there are only 20 % of the aquaculture animals used compound feed for the production, others are still stick to use raw material such as grass for feeding grass carp, trash fish for the marine species. Fish nutritionist forecast that with the increasing understanding of fish nutrition knowledge and improvement of feed manufacturing technology, the percentage of aquaculture animal usage on compound feed will increase to the 35% provided solid ground for the growing trend of aqua feed in China (锦秋财智咨询, 2008). Figure 1 showed the growing trend of China Aqua feed sales from 2000 to 2008.

Figure 1: The Aqua Feed Production (‘000 Mt) in China from year 2000 to 2008

Source: Adopted from BOABC-Annual China Feed Production Report year 2009

The aqua feed product range from different product types according to production technology that will have different characteristic such as floating extruder feed, sinking pellet and mash feed (Appendix 2)

The aqua feed offered in China also targeted to different species which can categories from fresh water fish feed, marine species, crustaceans and also amphibians (Appendix 3).

2.2 Environmental analysis

2.2.1 Natural Environment

 Land and water resources scarcity for aquaculture

China has rapid growing in industrialization, more and more land mainly for agriculture purposes will be converted to industry zone. With this reducing of the agriculture lands for ponds construction, it leads to rise of pond leasing fees in China. Farmers have to increase their output per area in order to cover the increasing leasing fees. The intensive culture of fish or shrimp will lead to increase demand for compound feed due to grass and trash fish will insufficient to support the fish growth under the intensive culture system.

 Shortage of raw materials.