Investment-friendly and geographically perfectly located to allow live and fresh fish to be shipped to market within hours, aquaculture in Mexico is under developed and a number of companies, with an eye to the future, have already seized the opportunity to set up farms in Mexico with many more in the process of doing so.
By the breadth, diversity, productivity and quality of the water in the coastal lagoons and coastal Baja Californian - 740 km of Pacific Ocean coastline and 640 km of Gulf of California coastline - aquaculture is recognized as an activity of strategic importance for the economic development, social and regional in the State, encouraging productive diversification, the creation of permanent sources of labour and the production of food of high nutritional quality. The municipality of Ensenada alone, with an extension of 1114 km of littoral, has 74,800 hectares of coastal lagoons, suitable for aquaculture.
Species currently being farmed include:
Oysters, manila clam, mussels, red abalone, totoaba, bluefin tuna, white shrimp, catfish, tilapia, rainbow trout, striped bass, horse mackerel, white croaker and sea cucumber.
Aquaculture production units include 14 for fish (tuna, striped bass, white bass and mackerel) 18 for white shrimp, 37 for molluscs (oyster, mussels and abalone) and there are currently six laboratories for the production of larvae and fingerlings (abalone, mussel, clam generous, Manila Clam, totoaba, oyster and Japanese kumamoto oyster).
