Message from the Ecoprawn Coordinator
Associate Professor
Food and Resource Economics
University of Copenhagen, Denmark,
Project Coordinator, Ecoprawn
Climate-friendly and climate-resilient prawn farming in Bangladesh shortly named as ECOPRAWN is a 5-year duration multidisciplinary DANIDA funded research project collaborated among PSTU, BAU, and University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The project funds eight PhD students.
The research activity is broken down into four work packages, each with two PhD students cooperating with their supervisors and researchers in Bangladesh and Denmark. Work package 1 deals with analyzing GHG (CO2 and methane) emissions in prawn ponds, work package 2 deals with alleviating seawater-induced prawn diseases, work package 3 with techniques for measuring economic viability and efficiency, while work package 4 deals with options of implementing greenhouse gas emissions reduction pushed by governance of value chains.
The project started with an agreement between PSTU/BAU and University of Copenhagen. Meanwhile, several online meetings were conducted among partners of the three universities. Eight PhD students, two from each work package, have been selected from a bunch of good candidates, who were invited through newspapers, the Ecoprawn website and websites of the universities. The candidates were interviewed by a board consisting of experts from the Bangladeshi and European universities.
All expenses related to their PhD research are covered by the ECOPRAWN project, including travel expenses, accommodation, and tuition fee in Denmark. They will be enrolled in the double degree program and have to stay at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark for nine months for attending courses and achieving supervision. During their stay in Denmark, they receive a monthly allowance.
During this 5-days endeavour, all domestic and foreign partners along with the PhD students will physically visit the prawn farms, hatcheries, processing factories and the input providers in Khulna and Satkhira areas. The researchers and their students will plan for setting-up their experiment of prawn farming introducing IMTA and application of probiotics. A start-up conference will be held in Dhaka 1 December 2022. The aim of the conference is to disseminate the project activities, sharing the ideas with the stakeholders, policy makers and related scientists, industrialists and other professionals. The project participants will also be enlightened and the activities will get a momentum through this conference. All the Bangladeshi and foreign partners will participate and exchange views on the Ecoprawn project in this conference.
I am very happy to know that a Conference brochure containing the background of the research, its objectives, expected outcome, students’ PhD titles and objectives etc. appear in printed form. I would like to convey my thanks to the package leaders, project partners, the members of the organizing committee for making the Conference a successful event. My special thanks go to both to Professor Badiuzzaman, PSTU, for taking the lead, and to the European partners from Copenhagen and other organizations for travelling from Denmark to Bangladesh for participating in the Conference.
I wish the conference a grand success.
Max Nielsen
November 15, 2022