One of China’s leading distant-water fishing firms is using its new base in Guyana to supply shrimp to the Chinese market.
Grandeast Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fuzhou Hong Dong Pelagic Fishery, which operates in Guyana as Fuzhou Hongpu Aquatic Products Co., has built a USD 25 million (EUR 21.4 million) plant to process whitebelly prawn (Nematopalaemon schmitti) for export to China. Hong Dong Chairman and CEO Lan Ping Yong told Minyang News, a business paper covering the Fujian region, in late September the plant is operational and that the company is looking at Suriname as a possible next location for investment.
However, this summer, the Guyanese government issued a statement denying that Grandeast had been issued trawler licenses and said “the company is not involved in the processing of other types of seafood at this time.”
Better-known for its giant fishmeal plant and seafood processing hub in Mauritania, in 2015, Hong Dong applied for licenses in Guyana for two trawlers, prompting protests among conservationists that the country’s fisheries were already fished to their limits.
During a visit by then-Guyana Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha to the plant in March 2021, local media reported the plant was also processing bangamary, sea trout, croaker, basha, snook, and Atlantic seabob.
Guyana’s trade deals with key markets, including the United States and European Union, allows favorable access for its seafood industry, and local government has longstanding plans to develop its fisheries sector. Guyana enjoys preferential market access to the U.S. under the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (CBTPA) while its goods enter the E.U. tariff-free under the CARIFORUM Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA).
Grandeast Inc. has the capacity to process 40 tons of shrimp per day, and according to the firm, has created 300 jobs, while also transferring processing technology and training that Guyana lacked.
A laudatory profile of Fuzhou Hong Dong boss Lan Ping Yong in the Minyang News this week casts Lan –who’s also a deputy to the National People’s Congress – as a self-made hero guided by China’s “One Belt One Road” initiative, a national government blueprint to increase China’s global reach. The blueprint has been used as an imprimatur for Lan’s expansion of a large processing hub and port in Fuzhou to service distant-water vessels. Lan told the newspaper that he was originally inspired to build a distant-water fleet by China President Xi Jinping, when Xi served as governor of Fujian and sought to build up a “marine economy.”
Photo courtesy of Poly Hong Dong
