Industry analysis

In the Eastern Caribbean, seaweed farming has emerged as a promising livelihood for coastal communities – with St Lucia, St Vincent, and Grenada leading the way – yet hurricanes, sargassum blooms and processing bottlenecks all threaten the long-term future of …

Although global aquaculture growth is forecast to slow down in 2026 after a year of exceptional increases for salmon and impressive results from many nations’ shrimp and tilapia sectors, there’s cause for cautious optimism for the year ahead. 

By satisfying the requirements of three key pillars of site selection, seaweed farmers will have a much better chance of achieving long-term commercial viability. 

South Korea’s olive flounder farming sector may have failed to reach the dizzy heights predicted by industry experts 10 years ago, but there are signs that it could yet deliver on its previous promise. 

The opportunities presented by smarter tools that can solve ongoing problems on shrimp farms are set to be the topic in a new session at this year’s Global Shrimp Forum.

Spanning nearly all the continents, the International Biology and Macroalgae Center (IBMC) hopes to use knowledge sharing between key seaweed producers to supercharge this ocean crop and make it a viable commodity on the global market. 

An in-depth analysis of Norway’s salmon exports in H1, featuring interactive data visuals, with a focus on key markets, product forms and growth dynamics.

The fourth instalment of the Global Shrimp Forum (GSF) aims to help the shrimp industry navigate an era of change and uncertainty. 

Direct seeding of seaweed has been hailed by some as the saviour of the industry, but experience suggests that it’s no guarantee of success.

Kelp is one of the fastest growing organisms on the planet; some species can grow up to two feet per day. The business of farming it in North America has the potential to grow at an equivalently staggering rate. In fact, in Maine it already has.

Anthony Bellafiore, investment manager at Katapult Ocean, one of Europe’s leading aquaculture and bluetech VCs, believes that it’s too soon to write off the West's fledgling seaweed sector. 

Artificial intelligence can undoubtedly be a transformative force in aquaculture, but do its current applications live up to the hype and will they ever be applicable across species, geographies, and scales of production?

US consumers of tilapia and salmon – as well as the producers of these species in China and Canada – are likely to be the biggest losers in the seafood space if President Trump goes ahead with his planned tariff hikes.

Shining a light on the important, and often overlooked, role played by hatcheries in the burgeoning global seaweed farming industry.

Briana Warner, who recently surprised the seaweed world by resigning as CEO of Atlantic Sea Farms, tells The Fish Site what’s next for the company, where she’s heading next and what the future is for investments into blue foods. 

Its annual production of 60,000 tonnes of mussels makes St Andrews the world’s largest producer of the bivalves, according to the Chilean company’s former farm general manager, Felix Howard.

Jonah van Beijnen explores the RAS-mania that grips the global aquaculture industry, along with the reasons behind the variable performance of these systems.

Francisco Murillo is perplexed by the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on failing RAS projects, when a fraction of the funding could help proven businesses like Tropo Farms produce tens of thousands more tonnes of tilapia a year.