With a little help from their friends
Southern Brazil is flush with home-grown oysters, thanks in part to UVic expertise

by Valerie Shore

An international aquaculture project managed by the University of Victoria has won an Award of Excellence from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

The Shellfish Culture Technology Transfer Program, which ran from 1993 to 1998, helped establish a thriving oyster culture industry in the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. The award credits UVic and its partner institution, the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, for helping to preserve a way of life in the state's impoverished coastal communities.

Only six CIDA Awards of Excellence are handed out every two years from among hundreds of university and college cooperation projects around the world. Winners are selected by outstanding scholars in the field of international development. This is the first time a B.C. university has won the award.

Oysters are a hugely popular delicacy in Brazil, but until this program began, the supply was limited and efforts to develop a domestic culture industry had failed.

UVic biologist Jack Littlepage saw this struggling industry first-hand when he visited Brazil about 13 years ago. "It was having a difficult time, but had a great deal of potential," says Littlepage, a mariculture expert. Once back in Victoria, he recruited the help of Tom Broadley, a UVic grad who was developing IEC International, a local biological consulting company, and they applied to CIDA for five years of funding. "We wrote the proposal and it was accepted," says Littlepage. "So it was initiated from Canada, really."

The success of the project is largely due to the co-operation among the players. The Brazilians built a state-of-the-art hatchery near the city of Florianopolis, CIDA provided the equipment, and UVic brought in the expertise.

"We were able to equip the hatchery with specialized materials so that they could produce larvae for culture," says Littlepage. "Once we had that going, it was a matter of training the fishermen how to nurture the animals, and help the hatchery with problems along the way."

The results are impressive. From 1992 to 2001, oyster seed (larvae) production jumped from less than one million to more than 22 million per year. In the same period, the number of shellfish producers, primarily local fishermen, increased from five to 679, and annual oyster production grew from 26,000 dozen oysters to more than 762,000 dozen.

The impact on the communities is estimated at $8 million, and about 700 direct jobs and 6,000 indirect jobs have been created. Other industries, such as processing and net-making, have sprung up. Florianopolis even has its own oyster festival.

"Restaurants are invited to prepare oyster dishes, there are trade shows, musical events, and an oyster queen and princesses," marvels Littlepage. "It attracts several hundred thousand people a year. It's really part of the city now."

And the Brazilians haven't stopped at oysters. Mussels, scallops and a second species of oyster are now being cultured. "The techniques that we transferred for shellfish reproduction can be used with any species to produce seeds at will and in vast numbers," says Littlepage.

In fact, Brazil's mariculture industry is flourishing, thanks in part to a second CIDA-funded, multi-university program in which Littlepage is also a key player. It involves five Brazilian states and a number of different speciesshellfish, shrimp and fish. In the process, UVic has become well-known and respected in many parts of the country.

Although Littlepage is now a professor emeritus and talks of "getting out of this sometime soon," he has some big plans up his sleeve. "We're developing a mariculture program that would expand throughout all coastal states in Brazil and up into the Caribbean and eastern South America," he says. "There's also talk about moving into Portuguese-speaking Africa, because there are some very poor countries there that have no coastal development at all."

But for now, he and his colleagues including his Brazilian counterpart, Dr. Carlos Poli, and program manager Pat Summers, are basking in the glow of their award.

"It's very rewarding to see so many people a lot better off than they were," says Littlepage. "One of the things we try to do is keep the programs small. We don't want to make big companies and rich people. There's a concerted effort to keep operations family-based with an emphasis on training women in management positions. That's really what programs like this are all about."

Littlepage with the CIDA award. (Valerie Shore photo)