Mark Godfrey is an Irish journalist covering the agriculture and fisheries sectors in Asia, with a focus on China. Proficient in Mandarin, he has frequently traveled across China's fisheries and aquaculture regions and learned the inner workings of China's corporate world during a nearly three-year stint at the Financial Times' “China Confidential” publication. He has also reported widely across Southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union. He has educational certificates in agriculture and food science, as well as Mandarin.
Author Archive
Chloe Cheung, a former banker and now a senior advisor on sustainable finance at WWF Hong Kong, is seeking government support for a new multitrophic aquaculture project, following a recently completed feasibility study showing the potential of farming of multiple species together.
Cheung and WWF have asked for the support of Hong Kong’s government in helping it pay the HKD 2 million (USD 1.08 million, EUR 1.17 million) required to
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A mussel farmer since 1983, Michael Mulloy is the owner of Blackshell Farm, which grows rope-grown mussels in Ireland’s Clew Bay. He also serves as the national aquaculture chair at the Irish Farmers Association, a lobbying group focused on promoting and protecting the country’s dairy, meat, and farmed seafood producers.
Ireland’s exports of farmed seafood totaled EUR 150 million (USD 163 million) in 2022, most of it from
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There are signs seafood demand is picking up in China after the country abandoned its zero-Covid policy in November 2022 and eliminated its checks and disinfection routines for seafood imports at its ports. But uncertainty abounds as to what the rapid spread of the virus in China will mean for domestic consumption and for the operation of seafood-processing facilities.
Seafood trader Pablo Resnik, head of business development at Spanish shrimp
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François Mosnier, head of the oceans program at nonprofit financial think tank Planet Finance, spoke to SeafoodSource about his organization’s new Seafood Database, which identifies the companies most exposed to overfishing, illegal fishing, and other sustainability risks across the USD 1.8 trillion (EUR 1.65 trillion) seafood supply chain. The database monitors 100 firms.
SeafoodSource: Have you talked to the companies on the list?
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The Atlantic shoreline of Clew Bay in County Mayo, Ireland, looks both pristine and wild in the giant photo billboards at the Xanadu Hotel in Guangzhou, one of China’s wealthiest cities. At a recent Irish seafood marketing event at the hotel hosted by Irish product-marketing agency Bord Bia, and broadcast on the Chinese Weibo social media platform, the images displayed alongside captions describing a “Green Isle” of pure waters
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The end of Covid restrictions across China have spurred a recovery in consumption of smuggled seafood in Hong Kong.
Demand for exotic and endangered fish species collapsed in Hong Kong during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, but has returned following the abrupt move by the Chinese government in December 2022 to end its restrictive travel and trading policies designed to curb the spread of the virus.
Yvonne Sadovy de Mitcheson, a professor
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The Chinese government has introduced an economic plan designed to wean the country off a reliance on exports and to increase domestic food production and consumption in the coming decade.
Published 15 December, 2022, the document, titled “Strategic Planning Outline for Expansion of Domestic Demand (2022-2035),” sets a goal of boosting domestic consumption to 50 percent of China’s GDP, repositioning the country away from a
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The Global Seafood Alliance issued new Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) certifications to 29 Chinese facilities in 2022.
Those certifications included nine processing plants, two new feed mills, and a hatchery in China, GSA China Market Development Director Xin Wang said. She said her organization is confident there will be continued strong demand for eco-label certification for operators targeting the domestic Chinese seafood market in
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A new research paper diving into China’s seafood production over the past 10 years has found static production volumes, with distant-water catches replacing aquaculture volumes.
The study, performed by Chinese agri-focused market research consultancy Neng Xiao Feng (also trading as BeeData), suggests a contraction in local aquaculture output, albeit from historical highs, alongside a surge in distant-water catches.
China’s total
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Shanghai, China-based distant-water fishing company Kaichuang Marine International has sold off one of its trawlers, citing the increased costs of operating in waters off Russia.
A subsidiary of state-owned Kaichuang sold the vessel, named the Kai Li, for CNY 72 million (USD 10.4 million, EUR 9.9 million) to Shandong Lanyue Ocean Fishery, another Chinese distant-water player based in Rongcheng, a key port for Chinese vessels operating
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