Mark Godfrey

Contributing Editor

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

Published on
June 27, 2024

Shanghai Kaichuang Marine International has acquired a final 30 percent stake in French Creek Seafood, a Canadian seafood trading firm headquartered in British Columbia, Canada.

Kaichuang Marine, a Shanghai-headquartered deep sea fishing company and seafood processor, will pay CAD 3.3 million (USD 2.4 million, EUR 2.2 million) for the stake through its wholly owned subsidiary Shanghai Kaichuang Deepsea Fisheries, it said in an announcement.

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Published on
June 27, 2024

More than 70 percent of the catch hauled in by China’s distant-water fishing fleet was shipped back to China for processing in 2022, according to a report from research consultancy Bee Data.

Some 2,551 Chinese distant-water vessels caught 2.32 million metric tons (MT) of seafood in 2022, up from 2.03 million MT in 2014, though the country’s distant-water catch accounted for only 3.3 percent of China’s overall seafood

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Published on
June 25, 2024

San José, Costa Rica-based insect protein firm ProNuvo has received a USD 2 million (EUR 1.8 million) investment from the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

The investment gives ProNuvo enough money to complete construction of an insect feed plant in Guápiles, Costa Rica, with a capacity of 4,000 metric tons per year.

IFC, a member of the World Bank, is the largest global development institution focused on the private sector

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Published on
June 20, 2024

Two cities straddling the Amur River, which marks the international border between China and Russia, have signed an agreement to cooperate on fisheries development.

Officials from Fuyuan, part of the Jiamusi municipality in China’s Heilongjiang province, signed an agreement with the local government of Khabarovsk, committing the two sides to cooperating on fishery production and processing in China’s northeast corner and in areas

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Published on
June 20, 2024
Resurgent demand in China is offering some hope to Irish crab exporters suffering from the impact of weaker buying power in key European markets.  Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE reported recently that a severe drop in demand for Irish brown crab in southern Europe has resulted in a 40 percent reduction in income for Irish crab fishers, according to a report from RTE, Ireland’s national broadcaster. “Crab processors are expecting a… Read More
Published on
June 13, 2024

China is tapping into Pakistan as an alternative seafood supplier, with tensions ramping up between it and its primary trading partners.

On 1 June, an air shipment of fresh mullet from Pakistan arrived in Kashgar, a city in China’s Xinjiang region, according to China Daily. The mullet was imported by Xinjiang Huizhou Import and Export Trading Co., which distributes seafood out of the Kashgar Comprehensive Bonded Zone Cross-border

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