A special Workshop on Aquaculture Certification was held on 26 June in conjunction with the VIETFISH trade show, which ran from 25-27 June in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. The workshop was organised by the ASEM Aquaculture Platform, with contributions from partners Ghent University, Wageningen University, Can Tho University and NACA. Approximately 60 people attended including farmers, researchers, certification agencies, and regional and international organisations.

Artisanal shrimp aquaculture is in a disease-induced crisis of lost production, into which are falling farms, gene pools adapted to farms, and small-hold farming as a way of life. Rising levels of inbreeding and an exceptionally strong, positive relationship between inbreeding and disease which is described here. The root cause is social: a nexus of human behavior in which breeders protect their intellectual property by generating inbreeding and farmers suffer the consequences.

The Department of Animal Husbandry Dairying and Fisheries, Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India has approved a national project on aquatic animal disease surveillance for five years and funding of INR 320 million (about US$ 6 million) has been allocated through the National Fisheries Development Board (NFDB). A national consultation on aquatic animal disease surveillance held last April 2012, attended by NACA, made a strong recommendation for the need for a national program on surveillance.

Under the ACIAR-funded project Culture-based fisheries development in Lao PDR and Cambodia a team from the Cambodian side of the project travelled to Lao PDR from 8-12 May. The exchange visits between the researchers and selected community leaders of both countries are a major component of the project, expected to facilitate networking and communication between the teams and to bring about an interchange of ideas and lessons learned.

Since 2005, students from the Koh Yao Noi school, working together with the Chiba Environmental Council (Japan), Koh Yao Noi Eco-Tourism Club and with coordination from NACA have endeavoured to restore the environmental damage from the tsunami, and to improve the livelihoods of local people through a variety of initiatives. One of the main activities has been the annual replanting of seedlings of locally occurring mangroves and tropical forest trees to regenerate the damaged areas.