Deputy Minister for Fisheries Eng. Ahmad Alayadah, and the Representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for the United Nations Dr. Abubakr Abdelaziz Mohamed.

Riyadh, 24 January 2017 -- In a joint meeting attended by the Deputy Minister for Fisheries Eng. Ahmad Alayadah, and the Representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for the United Nations Dr. Abubakr Abdelaziz Mohamed, a discussion occurred on FAO technical and assistance to the Kingdom during 2017-2018.

In this meeting, the two parties agreed on principle at six areas of cooperation, the most important one of which is the development of strategy and action plan to increase the national fish and seafood consumption. The importance stems from the relatively low Fish consumption in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

As the annual per capita consumption in KSA is estimated at 11 Kilograms, and decreased below that in the interior areas in a range of 5 to 6 Kilograms. The global average of fish per capita consumption touches 19 Kilograms per year.

The implementation of the strategy will include conducting study on the current national fish and seafood consumption and consumer habits, benchmarking best practices and lessons learned in promoting fish consumption in similar countries. In addition, it will include the development of a national program to promote fish consumption, and develop and initiate implementation of communication strategy to increase awareness of health benefits related to fish consumption.

It worth noting that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia targeting the production of 100 thousand tonnes from aquaculture farms during the National Transformation Program 2020, recording an increase of 70 thousand tones from the figures of last year. Also, a workshop on changing the consumption behavior was conducted last December in the presence of large number of specialized and related parties.

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