Some 10 trillion rails ($371 million at official exchange rate) has been allocated to expand aquaculture, Hossein Abdolhay, the deputy manager for aquaculture in the Fisheries Organization, said on the sidelines of a two-day conference held in the southern province of Yazd on Wednesday. Iran has an annual production capacity of 800,000 tons of aquatics but it produces only about 370,000 tons a year. Abdolhay announced that the administration is planning to breed 20,000 tons of aquatics, in cooperation with countries like Turkey, Norway, and France. To reduce the annual import of 5,000 tons of Tilapia – a type of freshwater fish inhabiting shallow streams, ponds, rivers and lakes – the official said, the product which originally comes from East Africa is to be bred inside Iran under supervision of the Fisheries Organization in Bafq, a town located in the east of Yazd. Tilapia was first imported and bred as a pilot project in Bafq Research Center of Saline Water Aquatics in 2008. The low cost of Tilapia breeding has made it profitable, officials claim. Tilapia is bred in dry provinces, far from natural rivers and not released into natural ecosystems due to its invasive nature.
