March 11, 2021

 

Aqua-Spark to start investment fund for African aquaculture

 

 

Aqua-Spark founder Mike Velings has announced a new fund dedicated to investment projects in African aquaculture.

 

The projects are expected to start this year.

 

Speaking at the World Ocean Summit on March 2, Velings revealed that plans are being made to launch the fund by summer in response to concerns that Africa was being left behind in terms of aquaculture growth.

 

Manuel Barange, head of fisheries and aquaculture policy at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), stated that Africa was in danger of being left behind in terms of the availability of fish and seafood products for its growing population.

 

"If you look at the composition of this panel, we all come from a very American, European, developed world context. From that point of view, from a business perspective, I think there is a very sweet spot that is being found, but the majority of aquaculture comes from China, 60% is from China, 85% from Asia," said Barange.

 

"Africa only has 2.5% of global aquaculture production and will be the only continent that, unless we do something about aquaculture development there, per capita fish consumption will drop by 2030. Just think about that. Just think where is food needed? Well, Africa will have a drop. There, the difficulties are completely different than one has in developing aquaculture in Europe or the US."

 

Barange added: "You need an enabling environment, in terms of policy and regulation, access to land, access to water, incentives and what have you, but once you get into the technical elements, you look at Africa and you don't have enough feed, you don't have enough finance, you don't have enough fingerlings, you don't have good bio-security controls or disease controls. You don't have good extension services and you have, particularly, completely underdeveloped value chains.

 

"All those elements, if you look at them individually have a great potential to develop aquaculture in Africa but we have to start very quickly and we have to start now. We can't delay this any further."

 

"We have two investments in Africa, one in Mozambique and one in Madagascar," said Velings, adding that together with Aqua-Spark's partners IDH, the company will launch an aquaculture fund specifically focused on Africa by this summer.

 

"We've built that infrastructure to make sure we have a good chance of preventing production and consumption from going down, instead of going up, as that is the last thing that we should want and it's also a great investment opportunity," Velings said.

 

 - The Fish Site