Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Josephine Pegg

Location: South Africa
Primary academic field: Aquatic science and fish conservation
Award category: PhD Holder

Guidance Memo

• Title: Scaling freshwater aquaculture: Trade-offs, risks and uneven outcomes - comparative insights from South Africa and Lao PDR
• How to cite: Josephine Pegg. Scaling freshwater aquaculture: Trade-offs, risks and uneven outcomes - comparative insights from South Africa and Lao PDR. Tiny Beam Fund, 15 May 2026, https://doi.org/10.15868/socialsector.52148.
• What We Learned From It:
  • The Guidance Memo uses the comparative lens of South Africa and Lao PDR - two countries differing markedly in governance context, sector structure and stage in their aquaculture development - to examine the widely-promoted claim that in low- and middle-income countries, the industrialization of freshwater aquaculture is a pathway to food security, rural development, job creation and economic diversification. Specifically, the Guidance Memo assesses how expansion of freshwater aquaculture interacts with environmental risk, fish welfare, policy design and the distribution of social and economic benefits in South Africa and Lao PDR.
  • We learned that across both countries, there is a mismatch between policy framing and operational reality. Large-scale freshwater aquaculture is not functioning primarily as a food security strategy. In Lao PDR: Smallholder aquaculture contributes to household nutrition and livelihood diversification, but industrial development is more closely aligned with commercial expansion and export-oriented investment. In South Africa: The sector remains relatively small and is framed largely in terms of economic growth and investment rather than subsistence or nutrition. In both contexts, aquaculture operates largely independently of inland capture fisheries, with limited evidence of direct substitution and, in some cases, potential for negative environmental interactions.
  • Moreover, the expansion of freshwater aquaculture in the two countries is also associated with a consistent set of environmental pressures, including nutrient loading, sediment enrichment, antimicrobial use, escape events and water abstraction, which are unevenly monitored and governed. At the same time, fish welfare remains largely absent from both policy frameworks and production standards.
  • These findings indicate that the risks associated with industrial aquaculture expansion are not incidental but structurally embedded within current development trajectories, and that outcomes are likely to be determined less by specifics of production systems than by the capacity and willingness of governance systems to regulate them.

Links

• Read the Guidance Memo
• Read the Annotated Bibliography

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application:

• This application covers aquaculture in both broad as well specific ways. In other words, it has multiple targets and serves multiple functions: Broad in the sense that: i) It deals with several large aspects - environment, livelihoods, animal welfare. ii) It aims to provide a template that is applicable to different LMICs. Specific in the sense that it engages closely with two specific communities on the ground, in two very different parts of the world.
• The approach of choosing, comparing and contrasting Laos and South Africa is smart because one can learn a lot from that comparison. Both are models of how large-scale aquaculture is being rolled out across LMICs. But these models are very different, and at very different stage of development: Laos is through direct infrastructure investment and foreign export markets; production has already reached international industrial scale (as seen in the 2,800-hectare Mekong River Pangasius Industrial Park which is developed with Chinese investment to export fish to China). South Africa is through state-backed industrialization schemes focused on domestic growth. Development is still in its infancy, but is actively promoted through government incentives (e.g. Operation Phakisa, and the Aquaculture Development and Enhancement Programme).