Aquaculture in Odisha is now at a booming stage, said Members of the European Union now visiting the State.
The members visited the State to evaluate control systems governing fishery products in Odisha. They made field visits and inspected the fish landing harbours along with fish producing farms from where mostly the exports are being made. The team would submit their report to the Government of India soon.
The team gave a positive nod about quality of the aquaculture products from Odisha. They also suggested setting up more pre-processing centers in Odisha. Presently, one preprocessing center is functioning at Dhamara.
Attending a meeting on Tuesday, the members expressed the positive note to Chief Secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi. Agriculture Production Commissioner Gagan Kumar Dhal, Secretary Fisheries and Animal Resource Development Vishal Gagan were present.
The European team was led by Dr Marcus Brunner and Dr Maria l Alcantra. They visited different places from November 21 to 28. The team inspected the fish landing centers at Paradip and checked the quality of the marine products. later, the members inspected Falcon fish production center at Bhubaneswar, some brackish water farms in Puri and Baleswar.
Replying to the mediapersons, Secretary Dhal said, “The European Union is the second largest importer of the fish products from Odisha. The export value to the European Union has increased to around `150 crore in the year 2016-17 from `89.42 crore in 2012-13”.
Other major countries importing Odisha aquaculture products include Japan, USA and Middle East countries. The value of total sea food export from Odisha has reached around `2,205 crore during the year 2016-17 from `908 crore during the year 2012-13.
Similarly, the total fish production in Odisha during 2016-17 has increased to 6, 08,100 MT thereby recoding a growth of around 17 per cent over the last year. This includes 3,93,730 MT of inland fish, 61,268 MT of brackish water fish and 1,53,102 MT of marine fish. The State has around 11 processing plants satisfying the norms of European Union.