How profitability assessment parameters score under large-scale commercial cultivation of different agarophyte seaweeds along south-eastern coast of India
2022
Mantri, Vaibhav A. | Dineshkumar, Ramalingam | Yadav, Anshul | Veeragurunathan, V. | Ganesan, M. | Īsvaran̲, Ka. | Thiruppathi, S.
Mass mortality of Kappaphycus alvarezii in India has severely hindered the employment opportunity of fishermen by diverting them to less-remunerative seaweed collection sector. The depletion of resources due to over-harvesting coupled with ongoing global supply chain crisis offers excellent opportunity to initiate commercial farming of agarophytes. The productivity and financial implications in terms of profitability assessment parameters have not been attempted before for Indian agarophytes. The comparison between four species, namely Gelidiella acerosa, Gracilaria debilis, G. dura and G. edulis under deployment scenarios (1TPD and 5 TPD), revealed G. debilis as productive spices in terms of requirement of rafts (9,000–163,636), area under farming (3.6–65.45 ha) and persons involved (100–1,818). It reported minimum payback period of 0.3 years, breakeven point of 66.56 tons of biomass with and highest internal rate of returns of 237.6% for high range yield scenario. All the agarophytes except G. acerosa registered profit, with maximum (0.46 million USD) reported for G. dura, followed by G. debilis (0.19 million USD) under yield scenario of 5-TPD. Thus, the present investigation confirms that commercial cultivation of G. debilis farming can be viable alternative to the fishermen along the south-eastern coast of India due to low skill set and small investment.
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