Cambodian lobster farmers will attempt to boost their yields this year as they try to keep up with increasing demands for the crustacean, officials at lobster hatcheries said.

Prum Vath, a lobster farmer in the Angkor Borei district of Takeo, told the Post yesterday that he sold 700,000 lobsters last year, a 150 per cent increase over 2010 when he sold only 200,000.

To keep up with fast-rising demands, he hopes to hatch a million of the home-grown crustaceans by the end of this year.

“The Cambodian markets [for lobster] are expensive and somewhat scarce,” he said.

“Big-scale aquaculture does not yet exist.”

According to reports from late 2011 by Nao Thouk, director general of Cambodia’s Fishery Administration, current Cambodian market demands for lobster reach up to 1,000 tonnes per year, while annual domestic supplies barely stretched to 100 tonnes.

The biggest lobsters now fetch about US$35 per kilo, while smaller specimens cost about $28-30 per kilo, Prum Vath said.