Delicious, tender grouper graces many a global dinner table with Taiwanese fish farmers a leader in world production. Many people know about this tasty entrée, but few are aware of its interesting and peculiar sex life. Grouper start off life as females before some later change sex to males when 6 to 8 years old. To manage this unusual reproductive cycle, Taiwan’s fish industry and government researchers have developed a range of leading-edge technologies such as artificial insemination and hormone treatments to induce spawning as well as sex change in females.
Taiwan’s remarkable success in cultivating grouper results from this technical expertise, and in particular its ability to overcome specific challenges related to breeding. In fact, the nation currently enjoys global leadership in artificial propagation methods for seven grouper species, breeding more varieties than any other country. Taiwan is the world’s top exporter of pond-raised grouper in terms of production value, with its grouper farming sector accounting for US$245 million of the nation’s US$1.3 billion in aquaculture output in 2013, according to the Taiwan Fisheries Yearbook published last year by the National Fishermen’s Association of the Republic of China (ROC).
Recognizing this expertise, Saudi Arabia turned to Taiwan when it sought to develop marine aquaculture. The Middle Eastern nation, which lacked experience and technical personnel, appealed to the ROC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) for assistance, and a seven-year cooperative project commenced at the beginning of 2011. Under the initiative, the Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund (TaiwanICDF), a government-supported nonprofit organization, established a partnership with the Saudi Ministry of Agriculture’s Fisheries Research Center in Jeddah as well as the National Agriculture and Animal Resources Research Center in Riyadh. The Fisheries Research Institute (FRI) under the ROC Council of Agriculture also offers scientific expertise to the Saudi institutions.
Liu Fu-guang (劉富光), deputy director of the FRI, explains that aquaculture has been practiced in Taiwan for more than 300 years, so it makes sense that Saudi Arabia would approach the nation for assistance. “We dispatch experts working for Taiwan’s global projects to help locals overcome problems. This might involve cultivating live micro-organisms like rotifers and daphnia to feed the grouper fry in Saudi Arabia,” he says. “But we also host annual one to two-week workshops for Saudi staff at our Mariculture Research Center in Tainan or the Tungkang Biotechnology Research Center.”
The US$1.5 million project with Saudi Arabia seeks to produce stocks of barramundi, or Asian sea bass, and gilthead sea bream, in addition to transferring larviculture techniques and investigating spawning cycles for orange-spotted grouper. Liu notes that there are many challenges involved in conducting grouper aquaculture and research. “A problem for induced breeding occurs when the female is mature, but the male is not,” he explains. There is an immediate solution, he notes, which is to cryopreserve sperm of mature grouper males at minus 70 degrees Celsius for future use.
“There is a broader problem, though, of naturally inbred grouper lines. This decreases survival rates and growth rates,” Liu adds. “The Saudi project seeks to understand this by implanting individual spawners with GPS biochips to track their breeding patterns.”
Taiwan’s long-standing friendship with Saudi Arabia relates to the period in the 1970s when the nation represented Taiwan’s third-largest aid donor after the United States and Japan. ROC President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) stated in the preface to the 2009 MOFA White Paper on Foreign Aid Policy that the US$100 million in aid Taiwan received annually in the 1950s helped propel the country’s rapid economic development. Accordingly, the president noted, “the people of Taiwan have long held the consensus that the nation is obliged to repay its debt and fulfill its obligations to the international community.”
So, not only does Taiwan oblige those like Saudi Arabia who aided it in earlier days, but it also helps less fortunate nations that require economic and other forms of assistance. In particular, the ROC focuses on providing technical support to its 22 diplomatic allies around the world.
Over the last decade, TaiwanICDF spent US$17 million supporting a dozen aquaculture projects in eight Latin American nations, the Pacific nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu, and Saudi Arabia. Lee Pai-po (李柏浡), deputy secretary-general of TaiwanICDF, credits the success of these programs not only to funding from MOFA and the support provided by the FRI, but also to the close involvement of National Taiwan Ocean University in the northern city of Keelung. “Projects are proposed in a bottom-up fashion, that is, following the agenda of each nation we work with,” Lee explains. “A needs assessment occurs in Taipei prior to approving any projects.”
The ROC’s aquaculture programs in Latin American have typically focused on tilapia, a globally popular freshwater fish. Taiwan is a major producer of this species. The value of its tilapia aquaculture industry, concentrated in the southern county of Yunlin, stood at US$110 million in 2013, according to the 2014 Taiwan Fisheries Yearbook. To date, Taiwan has completed tilapia aquaculture capacity-building projects in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras and Paraguay.
Working with international aid groups such as Food for the Poor (FFP) and World Vision, TaiwanICDF helps establish sustainable aquaculture programs. These cooperative projects also enable Taiwan to impart its expertise to the international nongovernmental organizations. For instance, FFP and TaiwanICDF jointly founded a Haitian aquaculture program in November 2009—only two months before the disastrous magnitude 7.0 earthquake in the Caribbean nation—designed to improve dietary nutrition while establishing an aquaculture industry. As part of this project, an FFP worker joined TaiwanICDF’s training course for project technicians. Upon completion of the Haitian project at the end of 2012, TaiwanICDF handed over tilapia program management to FFP.
TaiwanICDF manages ongoing aquaculture projects in English-speaking Belize and Saint Lucia, as well as Paraguay. The island nation of Saint Lucia is currently expanding its tilapia production with TaiwanICDF assistance, while also pursuing aquaculture cultivation of giant freshwater prawns. Other nations that benefited from Taiwanese expertise in production of this crustacean include Honduras, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.
James C. P. Chang (章計平), the ROC’s ambassador to Saint Lucia, notes that these programs provide substantial benefits to local populations. “A woman named Mrs. Emelin Charles attended one of our prawn workshops because her banana business was failing due to a local fungal disease,” he recalls. “Entering the class almost crying because she couldn’t afford school tuition for her family, she is now doing quite well as a prawn entrepreneur.” Local leaders appreciate Taiwan’s support. Senator Berthia Parle says that “I just loved Ambassador Tom Chou [周台竹] when he was here, helping local people with tilapia fish, with aquaculture.”
Saint Lucia, a major banana producer, may be able to apply Taiwanese research to further develop its prawn aquaculture industry. TaiwanICDF deputy secretary-general Lee, who holds a Ph.D. in agricultural technology, created the Journal of International Cooperation to highlight technical work not only by Taiwanese researchers, but by their counterparts in allied nations. A September 2014 article written by Lee and scientists from the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology in southern Taiwan’s Pingtung County focused on how compounds in banana peels may improve the health of prawns. “The results indicated that natural plant extracts, such as banana peel extract, when applied to prawn cultivation, not only possess antibacterial qualities, but also enhance immunological responses, which reduce the mortality of prawns,” Lee explains. This kind of beneficial research may be incorporated into future TaiwanICDF aquaculture workshops.
Meanwhile, the ROC’s aquaculture support in the Pacific nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu centered on cultivating saltwater species. TaiwanICDF completed a three-year aquaculture project in Tuvalu in 2013 focusing on production of milkfish, another species Taiwan produces in large quantities. Taiwan’s milkfish aquaculture, focused in the southern city of Tainan, represents a US$163 million industry, according to the Taiwan Fisheries Yearbook.
The Kiribati project also concerned milkfish, but in an extremely ambitious and more complex fashion. The ongoing six-year TaiwanICDF initiative there, which commenced in 2011, entails producing 30 million milkfish roe, leading to 3.4 million larvae and a total of 520,000 milkfish for release into surrounding ocean waters. Other aspects of the large-scale program include organizing 18 workshops for 600 people.
What makes the Kiribati project particularly fascinating involves the fact that milkfish, per se, do not represent the ultimate goal of the project. While the initiative provides locals with a way to decrease their traditional reliance on wild-caught milkfish fry, and repopulates local waters with milkfish, these results actually stand as a means to an end. Ultimately, the people of Kiribati have set their sights on another target, the much more valuable tuna. Around 200,000 of the farmed milkfish are intended to serve as baitfish for longline tuna fishing operations.
The project also offers wider benefits. TaiwanICDF’s report on the initiative notes that the know-how that local workers gain from this project “can be extended to livestock, which will benefit many other farmers by reducing the need to import thousands of tons of animal feed from other countries.” Broader impacts such as this are a key goal of Taiwan’s technical assistance work. By imparting its world-leading expertise to its diplomatic allies, the ROC seeks to build aquaculture industries as part of its overall promotion of economic development.
______________________________
Darryl E. Brock is an adjunct assistant professor of history at Central Connecticut State University in the United States, a recipient of the Taiwan Fellowship, and the co-editor of Mr. Science and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Copyright © 2015 by Darryl E. Brock