'Indian marine exports likely to touch $4 billion by 2010'

India's exports of marine products will touch $3-4 billion by 2010, according to G Mohan Kumar, chairman of Marine Products Export Development Authority (Mpeda).

"At present, India's exports of marine products is around $1.5 billion a year. We have drawn up ambitious plans to increase the marine exports to around $4 billion by 2010," he said.

Mohan Kumar, along with an European Union inspection team, was in Vizag to visit the processing plants in the state.

"India has over 60-70 per cent surplus capacity in marine products' processing plants. Keeping this in mind, Mpeda is studying the feasibility of making India a processing hub," he said.

"Some countries, which import shrimp from neighbouring countries, make a huge margin by processing the same and exporting the processed material. We have asked the Centre to ease the procedure for the import of marine products for processing and allow all ports to import the marine products. This would enable the Indian processing plants to import the shrimp and export the processed material in line with their foreign counterparts," he said.

Mohan Kumar said that Mpeda is primarily concentrating on three issues to increase the marine products' exports from the country.

"First, we should increase the aquaculture production. For this, we have initiated dialogues with all the coastal state governments and advised them to increase the aquaculture area as much as possible," he said.

"Though Indian waters have enormous reserves of tuna fish, we haven't been able to exploit the tuna reserves till date. At present, we are exporting about 6,000-7,000 tonnes of tuna a year. Now we plan to increase the tuna exports to about 50,000 tonnes a year soon," he said.

"Mpeda is giving utmost priority for the export of value-added products," Mohan said, adding that all these measures would help the country's marine exports breach the $3-billion in a short period.

Mpeda is working out a plan for extending financial assistance, with some subsidy, to the fishing vessel operators to modify at least 500 small and big fishing vessels in the country for tuna fishing.

"We will shortly announce this scheme. We are also organising a national seminar on tuna fishing in Visakhapatnam on February 10," he said.

Recently, the Gujarat and Orissa governments have constituted taskforces to increase the aquaculture area. There is huge potential in several coastal states, mainly in West Bengal and Maharashtra, for both seawater and fresh water aquaculture.

"Mpeda is encouraging farmers to produce finfish, tilapia, crab and other fish varieties, which have huge export potential, through aqua culture," he added.