Production Planning and Profitability Assessment of Aquaculture Enterprises

This course is a modified version of a course on Profitability Assessment in Small Scale Aquaculture Enterprises that was offered by the UNU-FTP in Mozambique in October 2011. The course was offered in collaboration with the University of Namibia and was held at the Sam Nujoma Marine Research Center in Henties Bay. A majority of the course participants were from the Namibian Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources, though others joined from private shellfish farms, money lending agencies, and UNAM fisheries science programme.

The first part of the course was spent on lectures about production capacity of a fish farm, with particular emphasis on principles of aquaculture, the connection between biology and economics, and effects of feed and water quality on production. The participants built a production model in excel. The second part of the course focused on profitability assessment of aquaculture enterprises, and the participants built a profitability model in excel to illustrate business concepts of NPV, IRR, discounting, sensitivity analysis, etc. Finally, working in groups, the participants used the production and profitability models to develop case studies using real data from three existing farms in Namibia.