Unfortunate circumstance: A shift to breeding cheaper fish during the pandemic left little time to raise large enough groupers, says farmer. — K.T.GOH/The Star
NIBONG TEBAL: If you had to buy grouper fillet at RM120 per kilo for Chinese New Year, it is because they are all caught in the wild and, as such, are rather rare.
Large groupers – of sizes big enough for fishmongers to slice into juicy fillets for your reunion steamboat feast – are not coming from local fish farms.
“It takes almost four years to breed groupers to at least 5kg each and we haven’t been able to do that because during the Covid-19 pandemic, there was no demand, so we focused on breeding cheaper fish,” said caged-fish farmer Teoh Tiong Hai.
The flesh of large groupers, he said, was firm enough for diners to cook in the steamboat broth without it breaking apart.
If fish farmers had extra-large groupers for sale, Teoh said the ex-farm price would have been under RM60/kg, making the retail prices more affordable.
During the pandemic, the 100-odd floating fish farms, which are visible to the left of the second Penang bridge as you drive to the island, had been breeding golden pomfrets, trevallies and snappers.
“Some of us did breed groupers, but not to extra-large sizes because there was just no demand.
“While it looks as if the pandemic problems are over, some activities like livestock farming will take a few more years to get back to normal,” said Teoh.
He was explaining the challenges faced by fish farmers during the recent annual dinner of the Sungai Udang Caged Fish Farmers Association.
These fish farmers collectively breed more than 40,000 tonnes of saltwater fish a year and their fish go to nearly every market, supermarket and seafood restaurant in the peninsula.
The association’s chairman, Tioh Tiang Lai, said fish farmers had been appealing to the state government to grant them exemption from paying temporary occupation licensing fees for the next five years, which can cost several thousand ringgit a year for each farmer, depending on the size of their floating fish farms.
“We want to be able to farm good fish for consumers again, and we hope the state will give us some support because it takes a lot of feed to grow large groupers,” he said.
He also hopes the authorities will relax the recent ruling on how fish farmers use their boats.
“Most of us were fishermen before we took up fish farming and we still have our fishing boats.
“The new ruling forbids us to use our boats to ferry workers, send fish feed to our floating farms, or even send food and other necessities. This ruling makes life extremely hard for us and the authorities make what we do every day look like some kind of crime,” he said.
