Prospect and Potential for Global Production

During the 1990s, tilapia products became an important commodity in the international seafood trade. Tilapia farming has grown from an industry based on fish introduced around the world by development agencies to feed the rural poor to highly domesticated livestock production with sales now exceeding $2 billion a year. The description of the tilapia as the aquatic chicken becomes more appropriate every day. As in the case of chicken farming, tilapia farming can be successful on any scale, from subsistence farmers with a few essentially feral fish in a pond to multinational corporations rearing highly domesticated fish with farms and processing plants in several countries. Tilapia have been domesticated more quickly and to a greater extent than any other group of fish. They surpassed salmonids in economic importance in 2004 and may eventually equal the carps.