Who are Apollo Aquaculture Group?
Apollo Aquaculture Group is a fish farming company based in Singapore that are looking to industrialise the food fishing farming industry in a safe and sustainable way. Since it was founded in 1969, the company has grown significantly.
How is the Aquaculture group helping boost food security?
The company is building a large, indoor eight-story urban fish farm, that will help Singapore to boost food security. This aquaculture facility will be one of the world’s largest and critical to secure a stable source of food to the already struggling island-nation. This will be Apollo Aquaculture’s biggest project so far.
Currently Singapore consumes around 120,000 tonnes of seafood per year, which has led to overfishing becoming a sizeable problem. Apollo Aquaculture group hopes their new farming solution can help to fight back against the problem, and help the fishing industry flourish into more sustainable waters.
The new farm is being constructed on an older farm, that produces around 200 tonnes of fish per year. The new farm will use high-tech gadgets to produce up to 3,000 tonnes of fish per annum, six times higher than established aquaculture operations in the Southeast Asian city-state.
This farm signifies the current shift of farming practices that will eventually dominate the industry. Additionally, farms like these will allow Singapore to be less dependent on foreign imports. Currently, the nation imports about 90% of its food. Becoming less dependent in foreign imports also allows the creation of more jobs and less pollution, as less fuel, time, and space is needed to move food from one side of the world to the other.
The long term goal is for the government to achieve its ‘30 by 30’ target for food security, meaning the island-nation will produce 30% of its food by 2030.
Urban fish farms have traditionally being avoided investors and developers due to their high operating cost compared to traditional fish farms; yet, Apollo Aquaculture Group’s farm has been able to lower operational cost due to the implementation of the newest technologies in the market, signalling a change for the industry.
Other projects that are helping to boost food security include several seagrass restoration projects. Seagrass restoration projects are often seen as one of many natural solutions.