Governor Arif Mohammad Khan has called for efforts to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) into the marine food sector to increase employment opportunities and boost the country’s exports. He was inaugurating the 22nd India International Seafood Show here on Friday.
Mr. Khan said he was confident that India would be able to increase its share in global seafood trade from the present 4.1% to 6.7% by 2030 by increasing production, value-addition, and diversification.
The show is the Indian seafood industry’s showpiece event and has for its theme ‘Blue evolution: Beyond production to value addition’. The three-day event is being organised jointly by the Marine Products Export Development Authority (MPEDA) and the Seafood Export Association of India (SEAI).
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The Governor pointed out that 40% of the global population lived within 200 km from sea coasts and 12 of the 15 mega cities were on the coasts. In India alone, around 40.5 million people were involved in the fisheries sector, which also contributed 1% to the gross domestic product, he said.
The seafood show is organised in Kochi after a gap of 12 years. Over 1,500 delegates, 50 of them from 12 countries, are attending the event to deliberate on policies and actionable road maps to achieve the country’s marine products export target of $10 billion by 2022.
MPEDA Chairman K.S. Srinivas, his predecessors Leena Nair and G. Mohan Kumar, Kerala State Industries Development Corporation chairman Christy Fernandez and SEAI national president Jagdish V. Fofandi too addressed the opening session.
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