A Profit Function Approach on Catfish Production In Nigeria

The growth of a country’s population is usually accompanied by increases in the demands for your basic necessities of life such as water, food and shelter. This is the case with the unrestricted increases from the demand for protein rich food items of animal origin especially.

The meal and Agriculture Organization, recommended that the individual takes 35 grams every caput of animal protein daily for sustainable growth and progress. However, the animal protein consumption inNigeria is below 8 g per person daily, which is a far cry from your FAO minimum recommendation. The major animal protein sources in the united kingdom include cattle, goats, sheep, chicken and fish. Out of these sources bass and fish products provide a lot more than 60% of the total protein intakes in adults especially from the rural areas.

Therefore, the importance of the fishing industry for the sustainability of animal protein supply in the united kingdom cannot be over-emphasized. Regrettably, the way to obtain food fish has been around the decline. This is due to consistent declines from your country’s major source of meal fish, the artisanal fisheries, from 90% in 1990 into 40% in 2006 resulting toabout more than 200, 000 metric tonnes (Global Agriculture Information Network GAIN, 2007).

At this time, domestic fish production is placed at 551, 700 metric tonnes as against the
present national demand of regarding 1. 5 million metric tonnes estimated for 2007. The shortfall is considered bridged by the importation associated with 680, 000 metric tonnes annually consuming about N 50 billion in foreign exchange that of having of boosting fish
production and thereby move the continent towards selfsufficiency in fish production is by entering fish farming especially catfish farming.

This has prompted the Government of Nigeria to package the particular Presidential
Initiative on fisheries and aquaculture development in 2003 to provide financial and technical assistance to government programmes and projects pushing fish production. Similarly, the Anambra State government begun an agricultural microcredit support scheme with fisheries bais so as to compliment the Federal Government effort.

Regardless these efforts of Authorities, fish production has remained low in the united kingdom as well as in Anambra Express. This has been attributed to inadequate supplies from your local catfish farmers due to the use of poor quality catfish seeds, inadequate information, high cost associated with feeds, traditional techniques, small size of holdings, poor infrastructural establishments and low capital investment

Greater improvement in catfish production can be achieved with a proper analysis which will lead to knowledge of how much profitability of catfish farming in addition to constraints to production which constitute the foundation for this study.