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by Darren Parris, International Aquafeed
his was a truly formidable WAS aquaculture conference. What can I say, other than well done to all that made it such a success! Attendance was superb, with more than 1,400 delegates alone from over 35 African countries that had all been sponsored by the African Union. In all we know there were in excess of 2,500 visitors as we had brought over 2,000 of our International Aquafeed magazines to the exhibition and they were all gone by the third day.
Sustainable Aquaculture
With the theme of “Sustainable Aquaculture” what better place to kick this off than in Africa, after those immortalised words were uttered by Roger Gilbert the then Founder and secretary General of the IFIF said in the presence of Kofi Annan at the UN in 1997 “We need to feed 9.5 billion people by 2050”. But how? Well these number and sentence have driven a crusade across the globe to focus on and work together to solve this issue. It was therefore no surprise that Dr Rohanna Subasinghe, the former chief of Aquaculture at the FAO, opened the conference with this very same topic. What followed over the coming four days were 70 excellent conferences on a multitude of topics and in between the conferences, the many delegates could visit the exhibition hall and visit with the over 100 exhibitors. We have included a selection of exhibitors from the event over the coming pages and if you missed 46 | July 2017 - International Aquafeed