RMIT University Project Dissemination at Aquaculture Europe 2025

Dr Pham Thi Anh Ngoc presented some of the findings from the RMIT University led project on “Assessment of Interactions Between Sustainability and Welfare Issues in Vietnamese Shrimp Farms” at the recent Aquaculture Europe 2025 conference in Valencia, Spain. In the introduction she gave a brief overview of the “Improving Farmed Fish Welfare in Asia Project” before leading into the approach taken by former colleagues Chung Thanh Phan and Thuy To from RMIT University Vietnam. Dr Pham herself is now a researcher at Wageningen Social & Economic Research.

Dr Pham presenting at Aquaculture Europe 2025

The project collected a wide variety of data from shrimp farms representing the broad range of production intensities practiced in Vietnam, from low intensity extensive pond farms to super intensive tank systems. The object was to evaluate each system for sustainability and welfare indicators to see what trade-offs might be involved when pursuing both improved sustainability and improved welfare, and to identify specific issues which raised the greatest challenges. The sustainability challenges were assessed in terms of governance, environment, economic and social.

Welfare was mainly assessed from farm husbandry records including stocking density, mortalities, growth rates and feed conversion. Management indicators such as physical health monitoring and visual observation of behaviour was also taken into account. Score systems for each indicator allowed an overall index to be developed which was then subject to statistical analysis using pairwise comparisons.

The key takeaways were:

  1. Welfare improvements lead to improved economic performance, especially in semi-intensive systems

  2. Welfare improvements lead to better environmental performance

  3. Environmental degradation has adverse impacts on welfare and economic performance

  4. Social improvements can impact on economic performance

The team are currently working on a paper for submission to an academic journal, but meanwhile further information and a video about the project is available via this blog post.