On November 5, under the care and guidance of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Shanghai Ocean University held its 110th Anniversary & “Double First-class” Construction Promotion Meeting. On this occasion, Qu Dongyu, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), sent a congratulatory letter. Carlos Watson, representative of the FAO in China, delivered a video speech. Manuel Barange, Director of the Fisheries and Aquaculture Division at the FAO, signed a memorandum of understanding on behalf of the FAO with Wan Rong, President of SHOU.
Inauguration of the Center for Ecological Aquaculture (CEA), the FAO
Throughout its development course, SHOU has always maintained close cooperation with the FAO, a core institution of international fishery governance. We jointly conducted training on aquaculture, fishing, and aquatic product processing as early as in the early 1980s. In addition, SHOU also trained aquaculture technicians from Southeast Asian countries, and participated in the compilation of fishery dictionaries. For years, many teachers of SHOU have attended all kinds of FAO conferences and activities on behalf of the country, and have been invited to take part in the negotiation of FAO-related international documents as industry experts. SHOU has also sent interns and teachers to the FAO for visiting internship. Many alumni of SHOU have grown to be high-end fishery talents serving the FAO, helping to establish bilateral cooperation of various forms between SHOU and the FAO.
As a “Double First-class” university with a focus on fisheries and marine sciences, SHOU actively participates in the negotiation of FAO-related international documents on biodiversity conservation, fishing techniques, and aquaculture, and the research projects of FAO in the fields of sustainable fisheries, deep-sea fishery management beyond international jurisdiction, port state measures, aquatic product trade and market, frozen storage of aquatic products, etc. We also compiled and translated FAO publications. Notably, in 2017, SHOU undertook several FAO international conferences in a row, and organized symposiums on major topics such as international promotion of rice-fish farming technology, international aquatic product trade and market, and sustainable value chains of aquatic products, contributing “SHOU Wisdom” to the sustainable development of international fisheries and aquaculture.
Benefiting from increasingly deepened involvement in the global fishery governance system led by the FAO, SHOU has gradually established an international fishery cooperation network under the FAO’s international cooperation framework, and developed smooth cooperative relationships with multiple international organizations in the fishery field (such as ICES, NACA, OECD, and WorldFish), as well as the fishery bureaus and scientific research institutes of many countries in the world. In 2021, the Fourth Global Conference on Aquaculture, of which SHOU was a main undertaker, was successfully held in Shanghai. The conference issued the Shanghai Declaration on Promoting the Sustainable Development of Global Aquaculture Industry (hereinafter referred to as the Shanghai Declaration). As an important achievement of the Fourth Global Conference on Aquaculture and a major measure to fulfill the commitments under the Shanghai Declaration, the （Center for Ecological Aquaculture，CEA） was inaugurated at SHOU under the framework of the memorandum of understanding signed between SHOU and the FAO.
In the future, SHOU will further focus on the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (such as “No Poverty”, “Zero Hunger”, and “Life under Water”) and the FAO’s Blue Transformation Strategy, and give full play to its unique advantages in the discipline of fisheries science, thereby making greater contributions in terms of ensuring the sustainable production of aquatic products, guaranteeing sustainable livelihoods, and conserving aquatic habitats and biodiversity.