14 Berchie Asiedu, Amos Asase, Seidu Iddrisu et al.
fingerlings, brood-stock and transportation. Lack of access to funds will
therefore limit the amount of feed and fingerlings farmers can purchase and
correlate to low aquaculture production. Rungwa et al. (2015) indicated that
capital investment/financial base continue to be a major challenge particularly
for the small and medium scale farms. A similar study by Hiheglo (2008)
showed lack of access to funds is major to aquaculture development in Ghana.
Poor Market of Farmed Fish Products
Poor market continued to be a challenge to the expansion of Ghanaian fish
farming enterprise. Poor market in this study include unstable prices, abuse by
marketing intermediaries, inadequate advertisement, unreliable market and
poor accessibility to market centres. When farmers were asked to state in order
of significance challenges peculiar to them, 9 operational farmers representing
27.3% presented poor market as major constraint to increasing production.
This was similar from abandoned farmers’ perspective, 12 farmers
representing 27.9% (see Figure 6 and 7). The results was inconsistent with the
findings of Anane-Taabeah et al. ( 2010 ) and Asiedu et al. (2015) where lack of
market emerged as a problem in the aquaculture industry.
Opportunities
Political Stability and Favourable Geography
Aquaculture in Ghana is still in the developing stage even though it started
about 60 years ago. Ghana is endowed with good natural resources such as
fertile land, water (rivers, lakes and the sea) and a large regional market that
can support aquaculture production. Considering the Volta Lake alone,
utilizing only 1% of the area of Lake corresponds to about 8500 hectares of
water (Asmah, 2008). Therefore, due to the favorable geographic conditions,
big opportunities lie in the expansion of the aquaculture enterprise. The culture
of new freshwater species and even marine species for the domestic market
can also be explored, especially considering that Ghanaians are also importing
more marine fish. Currently, only the local Akosombo strain of Nile tilapia
(Generations 1 - 10) can legally be cultivated in Ghana. Another opportunity for
aquaculture development in the country is the farming of a more performing
strain. Interest in better performing fish strains, namely the Genetically
Improved Farmed Tilapia (GIFT) strain, is very high among most fish farmers
and other stakeholders (Rurangwa et al., 2015). However, its introduction is