Aquaculture Revolution Prize

What is the Aquaculture Revolution Prize?

Our aim: A challenge prize awarded to the team that can invent a digital service that trebles healthy fish production by smallholder farmers in India or Bangladesh, and scales it to at least 50,000 fish farms within three years

Over the past half century, fish has gone from being a food source that was primarily caught wild, to one that is primarily farmed. Saltwater fish like salmon are widely farmed in Europe, but the world’s leading producers of farmed fish are all in South and East Asia, and concentrate on freshwater fish like tilapia and pangasius.

Huge production increases have come hand in hand with big leaps in technology – to maintain the health of fish, improve varieties, maintain water quality and, manage their feed. But much of these improvements have yet to shift from big, industrialised fish farms into the small ponds that many poor rural communities in the subcontinent rely on for their livelihoods.

Why a challenge prize?

Innovation has transformed large-scale fish farming, leading to huge increases in productivity per hectare. Innovations include technologies for monitoring and maintaining water quality (not just to keep fish healthy, but to encourage the growth of algae and plants that they eat), scientifically designing fish diets, using vaccines to prevent disease, and data-driven approaches to farm management. While some of these rely on complex science and engineering, they are now well understood and available off the shelf for big farms.

Examples of existing innovations include:

• App-based services like AquaApp and Matsya Setu that provide information and guidance to fish farmers.
• Feed the Future’s BANA project, which aims to increase production in Bangladesh fish farms.
• Improvement of fish species, for instance GIFT (Genetically Improved Farmed Tilapia), created by WorldFish, which grows about 85% faster than unimproved varieties.

But most of the technical innovations of recent decades are not adapted or marketed to the smallest farms, which are falling behind in production and viability. The proposed prize would encourage companies to adapt, bundle together and market these technological solutions so they could have impact for smallholder farmers. At the heart of the solution is likely to be a digital platform for managing fish farms, tied to providing inputs such as feed, training and finance.

A challenge prize could target specific, quantifiable objectives. Our economic analysis suggests that relatively modest improvements in fish pond management, of the type proposed in this prize, could lead to output as much as trebling for farms that use them. The challenge prize would incentivise innovators through combining a focus on farm-level outcomes (that show that the technology and service works), and targets for entry into market and reaching a certain level of scale (that demonstrates that the service has been well-designed for its target market, and which ensures impact at scale).

There is no single silver bullet for improving aquaculture production – rather, lots of small problems that need to be solved as the density of production rises. Innovators taking part in the Aquaculture Revolution Prize will have wide discretion in which specific services or technologies they bundle up, which they adapt and which they create from scratch. Just as important will be how they combine these – into a compelling, coherent, affordable and easy to use bundle that can be accessed by the community who needs it most. As such there is a wide range of skills and team profiles who could attack this problem from different directions – from traditional agricultural extension services to IT entrepreneurs; feed providers to research organisations.

There is a clear market opportunity – a large sector of smallholder farms, with a significant growth opportunity in their output. But up until now it has been more profitable to focus on providing services to the large-scale intensive fish farms. The Aquaculture Revolution Prize will shine a spotlight on smallholder farming services, and provide a financial incentive for firms to engage with, and create technology and services that cater to their needs.

The Aquaculture Revolution Prize focuses on unlocking these opportunities – bringing the tech to sustainably increase production of fish farms to smallholder farmers, creating wealth for their communities and sorely-needed protein for local diets.