Economics

Professor Kevin Fitzsimmons believes that there are plenty of positives to be taken from the last 12 months in aquaculture and has an optimistic outlook for the sector in 2024 – but mention the fisheries and marine ingredients lobbies to him at your peril.

GreenWave – a non-profit co-founded by Bren Smith in 2014 – recently launched a new app called Seaweed Source to facilitate forward contracts and build value chain relationships between growers and buyers in the North American seaweed sector.

China’s shift towards an increasingly Western pattern of seafood production and consumption – one that relies on imports from countries with greater natural capital per capita – appears to be gaining momentum.

Although Venezuela has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the hardest countries in the world to do business in, Grupo Lamar is on course to reach 100,000 tonnes of shrimp production next year, offering a ray of economic hope for the struggling nation.…

Ecuador’s meteoric growth in shrimp production shows no sign of slowing down – despite the decline in global shrimp prices – according to one of the sector’s leading analysts.

Plans to replicate a successful pilot programme in Uganda, which involves the creation of aquaculture hubs that provide a cluster of local farmers with a market and also key inputs, are gaining momentum, following the formation of a new partnership.

Femi Ilesanmi Eniola is the founder and CEO of Osky Catfish, a vertically integrated company that produces 30 million catfish fry, has 80 grow out cages and does its own training, processing and exporting.

A new report on the most exciting emerging market opportunities in the seaweed sector – which has been compiled for the World Bank by Hatch Innovation Services – has recently been published.

The Zimbabwe government has embarked on an ambitious aquaculture programme that it says will address food insecurity, unemployment and income generation – but critics have labelled it a “vanity project.”

How shrimp producers – and those who provide their feeds – can remain solvent during a time of rock-bottom shrimp prices and record feed costs will form the crux of many of the discussions in the feed session at the forthcoming Global Shrimp Forum.

The second half of 2023 could be “the most challenging period for global aquaculture since the peak of the pandemic in 2020”, while for the shrimp sector it could be the toughest period since the outbreak of EMS in 2011.

A comparison of hard data and anecdotal evidence from the world’s key shrimp producing and consuming regions will be the subject of a special two-part plenary session at this year’s Global Shrimp Forum.

Indonesian fish farmers are revolutionising aquaculture by producing their own feed, reducing expenses and promoting sustainability.

Ireland’s Pure Ocean Algae has finished building a 600 m² seaweed hatchery building on the Beara peninsula, hoping to address the industry’s biomass bottleneck and set it on the path to success.

Peter Green, founder of Paxtier – an algae tech innovation newsletter and community – shares his thoughts on the sector’s most promising startups and some of the key emerging trends.

Oluwasikemi Olabisi is the director of The FarmLady Aquatics Limited, a consulting company that helps prospective and existing catfish farmers through training, mentoring and production of healthy catfish juveniles.

The rise of the offshore wind industry is a fantastic opportunity for the seaweed aquaculture sector, according to David Lamb, founder of Cultivocean.

Enos Were, the managing director of Jewlet Fish Farms, is a pioneer who has transformed East Africa’s aquaculture industry by training countless fish farmers, researchers and government officials, as well as developing his own successful independent farm.