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
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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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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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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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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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an alert in May 2024 upon the discovery of excessive levels of chloramphenicol – an antibiotic banned by China that is typically used to treat bacterial infections – in imported tilapia produced by Hainan Eternal Springs Fisheries Co.
The alert comes as China’s tilapia sector is already facing such headwinds as low export demand and higher input costs.
Chinese tilapia
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