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The Minister of State for Fisheries, Ms Hellen Adoa has urged players in the fisheries sector to add value to their products during the fish processing chain in order to fetch more income for themselves and revenue for the country.

“We can do value addition to fisheries which can decongest the lake, teach people on a cheaper way of fish farming, we cannot continue smoking fish with our firewood, when you smoke fish with firewood, you will be eating part of that wood. The best plan is for government to get a better way, we are now starting with kiln but it seems to be smaller, we need to expand so that the youth and women can be able to smoke fish in tans to sell both locally, regional and international market” she said.

Ms Adoa made the remarks at the closure of the Euro15.5 million (approximately Shs 63 billion) seven year Responsible Fisheries Business Chains Project (RFBCP) that started in October 2016 funded by Giz (German Agency for International Cooperation) in Jinja on September 26.

“If youth are given such a project, I can assure you, no youth will want to enter inside the lake. They will want to wait for it outside, then after smoking it, they do the packing. Also, silver fish can be fried, packed, made into powder through value addition. Such fish can even take a year before it can go bad,” she said.

Ms Adoa said there is need for government to reinvest money collected from the fisheries sector in order to improve it to meet the growing demand on the foreign market especially China.

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