The third international symposium on tilapia in aquaculture

The study of constraints affecting the development of fish culture in rural Côte d'Ivoire has shown that it is impossible to use farming methods that require expensive inputs such as supplementary feed. In contrast, farmers are willing to devote much of their time to fish culture if their work is adequately compensated. When available, most inputs really accesible to farmers have a poor nutritional and/or fertilizing value. The efficient use of the limited trophic resources can be done through : (1) the qualitative trophic and/or quantitative improvement of the flow of substances in the different levels of the pond trophic web (direct feeding, autotrophic productivity and heterotrophic microbial productivity) and (2) improvement of the accessibility to trophic resources by the fish. The present study is based on on-farm and on-station experiments focusing on : (1) the improvement of culture environment (treatments based on use of rice bran to which green manure may or may not be added, and on combined fish and rabbit culture) and (2) the use of a substratum made of bamboo or branches (acadja) to improve fish accessibility to primary production (attempts to substitute commercial feed by acadja system in lagoon pens have already been giving promising results). The results from this study confirm the importance of adding substrate for primary producers, of combining fish and rabbit culture and of using green manure for the improvement of pond production. New approaches for research and R&D in low input fish culture are suggested. (Résumé d'auteur)