FINANCIAL EVALUATION OF AQUAPONICS PROJECTS AND THE FEASIBILITY OF ADOPTING IT IN EGYPT
Despite the role of the agricultural sector in the Egyptian national economy, the agricultural production falls short of total consumption needs in Egypt, which led to start thinking to intensify the production of food by vertical expansion beside conventional agriculture through the use of modern technologies, such as aquaponics as soilless agriculture, which the Egyptian farmers are not familiar with, so the paper aims to evaluate the proposed aquaponics projects in terms of economic assessment, financial assessment, SWOT analysis and to identify the level of technology adoption of the aquaponics agriculture and from which information sources they obtain their knowledge and to identify the requirements of dissemination of aquaponics technology and the most important problems facing them and proposals to solve. The research methodology used for achieving our objective was based on some statistical and financial tools, such as percentages, correlation, and regression model, as well as the feasibility study for the aquaponics agriculture, where the paper concluded the following results: The main source of information for the aquaponics derived from the Central Laboratory for Agricultural Climate at the Ministry of Agriculture. Most of the respondents belong to the low adoption category with the impact of the exposure degree to information sources and the risk willingness on the degree of adoption of the Aquaponics technology. The results showed that the payback period of the second category projects is shorter than the first and third category projects. By comparing the IRR with the alternative opportunity to invest at a discount rate of 23% and 25% showed the project's ability to bear the adverse changes. By comparing the return on investment (ROI) the internal rate of return (IRR) and the Payback period (PBP) between the three categories, the second category projects has been proved and better results achieved at the level of the financial measures used. Comparison of break even analysis of the three categories shows that the second category achieves the common break even point in terms of quantity and value before the first and third categories. The most important problems faced the adopters of aquaponics were the interruption of electricity and high risk rate significantly when implement the aquaponics project and the lack of funding for the implementation of the aquaponics project and the lack of knowledge of responders about who can resort to them to design and supervision of the aquaponics units. The most important proposals to overcome such problems are raising farmers awareness of the need to provide generators in sufficient numbers to use in the event of power outages and the interest of the authorities responsible for training courses for farmers on the aquaponics and to inform them of the schedule of these courses and provide brochures and booklets on the aquaponic technology and offer Facilitator loans to farmers to finance aquaponics projects and educating farmers about the most important entities where they can resort to them to designing and supervising aquaponic units.
Arab Universities Journal of Agricultural Sciences