DEFINING AND IMPLEMENTING A TILAPIA WELFARE ASSESSMENT PROTOCOL IN ASIA

The aquaculture industry, especially in the Global South, is at a similar stage of development as the pig and poultry sectors were 30 to 40 years ago. The sector’s drive is to develop production systems that remove the animal from its environment and possible disease challenges, rather than meeting the animal’s health and welfare needs. This initiative aims to bring fish welfare assessment efforts closer to the welfare assessments used for many terrestrial farmed animals and with that, improve aquaculture production processes and industry engagement, toward better Fish Welfare, focused on a win-win situation for farmers, processors, retailers and food brands and also the consumers by:

- Create awareness of tilapia, carp and shrimp welfare?

- Standardize data collection for tilapia, carp and shrimp welfare?

- Engage farmers with best practices?

- Promote transparency with culturing practices?

- Engage the Tilapia, Carp and Shrimp industry stakeholders in best welfare practices?

- Engage as many farmers and other stakeholders as possible under the animal welfare  scope.?

The farm is where most actions of welfare improvement can be performed. With that in mind, FAI is developing processes,methods and tools with several institutions and organizations in Brazil, China and Thailand.

Technological Advances

1. Develop and deploy specie specific scientific proved and industry accepted indicators, for Tilapia, Carp and Shrimp allowing Farmers to apply better fish husbandry at the farm level. 
2. Develop a user-friendly self-assessment app tool to facilitate scaling the on farm self-assessment allowing farmers to constantly benchmark their own production both internally and with others and seek knowledge (online and in person), to secure optimal productivity farm level routine.
3. Secure engagement and best practices promotion through the industry and processors by allowing users to report on their developments in terms of positive welfare processes and actions and secure better yields and quality.
4. By secure and independent flow of information, Food brands and retailers can provide more transparency to their clients on how and under what conditions their food has been produced.

Based on https://www.fao.org/3/cc0407en/cc0407en.pdf