A METHOD TO BENCHMARK FARMED SEA BREAM BATCHES EFFICIENCY

Sea bream fish farming is a well-established industry in Mediterranean basin with Greece, Turkey and Spain being the main production countries. The competition between producers has increased through the years and the vast majority of production firms compete in the same market with unbranded commodity products. The main competitive advantage of the producers acting in the market remains the price and as such the efficient production seems to be the ultimate goal in order to survive under hard price competition. In order to achieve the highest economic performance, high technical efficiency of batches of fish stocked every single year needs to be achieved. To date, a number of traditional biological indicators such as feed conversion ratio (FCR), specific growth rate (SGR), and survival are used to compare various batches. A method of benchmarking batch efficiency is proposed. Data Envelopment Analysis employed to estimate Technical Efficiency using several batches of Gilthead sea bream (Sparus auratus) stocked during 2012 in representative production areas of Greece and in farms operating under the same overall management. DEA efficiency scores and ranking using traditional indicators is presented. The findings provide support to production managers in focusing on improvement of specific factors of interest for batch efficiency and to evaluate their decisions, such as month of stocking, area of stocking and juveniles’ weight at stocking. Furthermore, findings may assist administrators in providing best practice guidelines for Mediterranean fish farming operations.