Overview
This project aimed to increase householder income and improve the nutrition in Cambodian rural communities through culture-based fisheries.
Culture-based fisheries can increase food fish production and improve rural community well-being in most Asian countries, and increase inland fish production globally. Culture-based fisheries are low-cost, mobilise dry land farming communities (e.g. rice farmers) to use existing water bodies to produce food fish, and when adopted, bring about communal harmony and synergies in farming communities. The strategies to optimise benefits from culture-based fisheries, however, vary from country to country and across climatic regimes.
In Cambodia culture-based fisheries are recognised as a low cost strategy to raise the living standard of many poorer rural households, to produce nutritious food for a growing population, and to safeguard food security at national level.
The project extended culture-based fisheries to wider geographic areas in Cambodia, and promoted them as an innovative, low cost strategy to improve food security.
This project, working in Laos and Cambodia, developed a suite of better management practices for water bodies that are suitable for culture-based fisheries activities, and a related dissemination package(s) that governments and NGOs could use. The research can benefit the communities involved in culture-based fisheries, which are often rural and impoverished and not easily reached by research interventions.