December 14, 2007

South African company Coega opens hi-tech prawn farm

A 1,200-hectare high-tech prawn-farming facility that will employ some 11 000 people is to be developed at Coega Industrial Zone, following a successful pilot phase, local mariculture company Sea Ark announced.

Coega is in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.

The project, expected to reach full capacity by 2014, has a total investment value of R 9,2-billion (US$1.3 billion).

When fully operational, the Coega plant would have the capacity to produce 20, 000 tonnes of jumbo shrimps a year, mostly for export to the US, Japan, Europe and other markets, where they are highly popular.

Sea Ark would manage the technology along with two other companies, project management company BuildAll, and Sondolo Information Technologies (IT).

Sea Ark, BuildAll and Sondolo IT all belong to the Bosasa Group of companies, a diversified broad-based black economic empowerment (BEE) organisation that operates nationally

The company said that South African and US scientists, working in Coega, have developed a closed biosecure prawn farming system which combines computer-driven control systems with biological science.

The company boasts that the pilot project had proven that its technology would enable farms to have the ability to grow prawns faster, with a lower food consumption rate, and with greater densities than in other systems currently operating worldwide.

Besides providing employment to 11,000 people, the Coega facility would further generate 88,000 indirect employment opportunities.

Meanwhile, Sea Ark has also signed an agreement with Chinese company China Direct to provide its technology and management expertise to the latter's plant in Zhangjiang. Besides the transfer of technology, the arrangement would see Sea Ark's software engineers monitoring conditions at the Chinese shrimp farms remotely from South Africa.