The Rectorate and Conference center of the University of Zaragoza hosted Spain’s 14th Aquaculture National Congress, from 3 to 5 October 2017. Around 300 aquaculture experts came together under the heading “Our aquaculture, a safe bet” to discuss feeding and nutrition, breeding and genetics, pathology, health and welfare, aquariology, food quality and consumption, environment and spatial planning, production and technology or business innovations.
In addition to these technical sessions, an informative session on H2020 projects was held on Thursday 5th October, where MedAID (Mediterranean Aquaculture Integrated Development) played a relevant role. The project’s technical coordinator, Bernardo Basurco, who is in turn the President of the Spanish Society of Aquaculture (SEA), chaired the session together with Dolores Furones (IRTA and MedAID scientific coordinator) and presented MedAID’s objectives, structure and expected impacts to more than 60 participants and various specialized journals.
MedAID is a four-year project (starting May 2017), with the aim of increasing the competitiveness and sustainability of the Mediterranean marine fish aquaculture sector along its value chain, by improving its technical productivity and economic performance with a market and consumer oriented approach and a higher social acceptability and better governance.
Along with MedAID, 6 more European projects were presented: PerformFish, which shares objectives with MedAID; ParaFish Control and Vivaldi, focused on fish and bivalve mollusk diseases; SABANA, whose objective is to improve the production of microalgae; Ultrafish, aiming at generating an eco-innovative processing system; and Era-ChairEcoAqua to improve aquaculture from an ecosystem approach.
This was a session to inform and disseminate the objectives and outcomes of European projects where MedAID had the opportunity to present its proposals targeted at solving specific bottlenecks of the Mediterranean aquaculture industrial throughout the whole value chain.
Abstracts (in Spanish) of the projects presented in the H2020 project session can be found here