Disease outbreaks in aquaculture systems can be devastating, especially for those who are not equipped to deal with them. Small aquaculture enterprises in Africa don’t have the resources to address biosecurity like their large global counterparts, with high level technology, biosecurity plans and large- scale disease surveillance. Lack of veterinary and diagnostic capacity in Africa further exacerbates the situation. A need exists for a health and biosecurity plan that fits the realities of African aquaculture and the farmer’s pocket. To this end, in collaboration with the Tilapia Aquaculture Association of South Africa, a tiered farm flagging biosecurity plan was designed by Dr Gillian Taylor of African Aquatic Veterinary Services. This plan not only minimizes disease introduction risk and outbreaks, but also helps farmers increase their profit margins and the marketability of their products, by identifying underlying stressors that impact productivity , growth and health. With stress and subclinical disease found to play a significant role in farm outputs in South Africa, the biosecurity plan focuses strongly on identifying farming and husbandry practices affecting health like water quality, system design and filtration, nutritional impact, disease management and lack of biosecurity. In addition to biosecurity and disease surveillance, strong emphasis is placed on training and developing the farm team to better understand and manage health and biosecurity on the unit.
To provide accessibility to small scale farmers, the plan provides three farm flag status awards, each with varying levels of input and cost, b ut with the goal to allow affordable entry and development of start- up farmers. All three levels build upon each another, increasing in difficulty and qualifying requirements – such as training and rigorous screening – moving from Yellow Flag to Green Flag and, finally, at the highest level, Blue Flag farms.
This certification system now serves as an industry standard for the tilapia sector in South Africa and has achieved global recognition as a novel certification standard.