SINGAPORE – Aquaculture farms in Singapore can now get free advice from a subsidised service to help them manage diseases that can affect the survival and growth of aquatic animals and impact their harvests.
With the launch of the Singapore Food Agency’s (SFA) Aquatic Animal Health Services (AAHS) on Tuesday, farms can turn to aquatic animal health veterinarians and other experts for professional consultation and disease investigation.
This comes as the country aims to produce 30 per cent of its nutritional needs by 2030, with seafood identified by SFA as a priority since it is a resource-efficient source of protein that can be grown by land-scarce Singapore.
But diseases in the Republic’s waters can be deadly to farmed fishes, with one such pathogen – the scale drop disease virus – forcing Singapore’s only fish farm operator in the southern waters to stop commercial production at its three ocean-based farm sites.
On Tuesday, SFA said it has engaged veterinary consultancy service VetTrust Singapore through a tender called last September to provide manpower for AAHS.
The agency said AAHS will enable it to gather information on the disease situation and areas for improvement in biosecurity practices in each farming region. This will benefit overall planning and resourcing to better support the local aquaculture industry.
Dr Astrid Yeo, senior director of SFA’s Regulatory Standards and Veterinary Office, said: “This service is a step towards ensuring the sustainability of our tropical marine aquaculture and securing a steady supply of safe seafood.
“It is heartening to know that 11 farms have already signed up for AAHS. We encourage more farms to make use of this service to improve their farm biosecurity and management.”
In 2022, Singapore had 27 land-based seafood farms and another 109 based in the sea, the majority of which were located in the Johor Strait.
Among those that have signed up for the new service is Goh Marine Fishery, whose director Kelvin Tang said the new resource will help his workers learn to identify diseases earlier to minimise fish mortality.
“We signed up for this service as it will be very expensive or make no economic sense for individual farmers to seek such assistance from professionals on our own,” said Mr Tang.
AAHS will include laboratory diagnostic analyses for health screening during scheduled consultations and identification of causes during disease investigations. It will also provide interpretation of the results and share advice on how to improve farm management.
SFA will fund two consultations a year for each farm in the first two years, followed by one consultation a year in the next two years. Farms will also get one disease investigation a year throughout the four years.
The funded consultations and disease investigations can be up to three hours per session, with the lab analyses provided to the farmers, SFA said.
It added that farmers will bear the costs of extended or extra consultations and disease investigations, prescribed veterinary drugs and chemicals, vaccines, transport and other expenses.
Responding to queries, Dr Han Zi Yang, a veterinary consultant and managing partner of VetTrust Singapore, said the consultancy service looks forward to working closely with farmers in improving aquatic animal health and furthering the knowledge of local aquatic animal diseases.
“Aquatic animal health is not as well studied compared with terrestrial livestock species like poultry and swine,” he said.
“Hence, there are still a lot of knowledge gaps that will require combined effort from the aquaculture industry, veterinarians, aquatic animal health specialists, pharmaceutical companies and institutes of higher learning to work together to fill.”
