The island nation is poised to see the farming of aquatic foods thrive, thanks to its historical links and promising location.



The farming of aquatic foods either from tanks on land or within enclosures out on open water—also known as aquaculture—offers a promising response to many of the pitfalls and risks encountered when harvesting wild fish in Africa.



Issues of illegal fishing, overfishing and environmental contamination could be managed under conditions where the enterprise controls inputs–from hatchery to harvest.



In 2018 the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) launched the Blue Growth Initiative aimed at reducing African food insecurity by supporting more productive, responsible and sustainable fisheries and aquaculture sectors.



The FAO’s target countries include Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan and Uganda.



Ferme Marine de Mahebourg Ltd (FMM), based on the periphery of Africa, on the island of Mauritius, is an innovative fish hatchery located on the east coast near Pointe aux Feuilles, and it could well be a model for what private sector players can bring to the discussion.



The 15-year-old project marries location to opportunity through a network of international treaties as well as Mauritius’ rather unique history as a colony of two European powers. The island—located south of India in the Indian Ocean—also claims a unique mix of heritages: British, French, South Asia, East Asian and, of course, African.



For starters, there is its location of the business, in a lagoon that separates the farm’s nursery from the open sea. That means no pollution from ocean-going vessels, and very few native predators beneath the ocean surface.



“Pure, pure water,” says Alessandro Galioto, FMM’s chief operating operator. “From six cages when we started, we’re doing 112 cages now.”



Then there’s the product, itself. Two hundred tons raised monthly of a single species. American consumers call it Red Fish (the scientific name being Sciaenops ocellatus), known in other areas around the globe as Red Drum, Channel Bass, Tambour Rouge, Corvinon Ocelado and Ombrina Ocellata.



Pierre-Yves Semasse, FMM’s director, notes the species is native to the waters of the Caribbean Sea—Cajun food enthusiasts enjoy the peppery “blackened” recipe served up in New Orleans’ eateries—but its popularity in Africa dates to the 1980s.



That’s when a French government agency began a food-security initiative aimed at some of the country’s overseas assets, including Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Americas and the islands of Réunion, Seychelles, Mayotte, Madagascar extending from Africa’s east coast, then all the way out to Mauritius.



Due to Mauritius’ status as a former French and British colony, shipments of FMM’s Red Fish enjoy favorable import status across Europe. Another break is the daily flights of tourists from Europe mean daily access to cheap back-haul rates on air freight.



“Also, the hotels those tourists go to,” Semasse explains, adding, “We sell our harvested fish there, as well”.



Besides the trade pacts and air routes tying Mauritius to Europe, FMM’s African links are not insignificant, particularly with regards to employment. The company boasts a multinational workforce: divers from Tunisia, processors from Madagascar, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, technicians from Europe and India.



Mauritius is one of 16 members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which helps FMM utilize labor from the continent, when needed.



“I just got authorization for 50 more [workers],” Semasse says.

Fishermen and big tuna fish on the Tamarin beach

Hooked On The Haul: Mauritius Makes Waves In Aquaculture

Aquaculture could be Africa’s next big thing in business. But it could also be a difficult catch.
“Before anyone goes into Africa, you need to take off the enthusiasm, take off the crazy entrepreneurial hat and get the fundamentals right, before they come back to bite you.”
This is the warning from veteran Gavin Johnston, Head of Aquaculture Consulting and Management Services, who has spent 20 years in the game across Africa. He has seen it all.
Johnston’s journey began in 1994 where he worked in South Africa’s abalone industry in Hermanus. At the time it was little more than an experiment to see if the snail-like delicacy, in high demand in Hong Kong, could be farmed on Africa shores; it grew into a million-dollar industry
“Abalone is a niche within a niche. It’s the high-end of society that wants our species. There is lots of different species. The market is complex. The price can fluctuate by as much as 200 percent depending on how it was dried or its slight color differences. With a capacity of 80,000 tons a year, [South Africa] is currently producing 1,300 tons. We are a small fry that supplies a small portion,” he says.
When it comes to aquaculture in Africa, abalone has shone. It remains to be seen if similar pilot projects such as South Africa’s Operation Phakisa, launched by President Jacob Zuma in 2014, will be as successful.
“It is looking at ways of exploiting the coastal and marine environment to create jobs. Aquaculture is there and it’s kind of the new buzzword. But here are the graves of so many failed projects&#8230; Government is seeing something interesting in that aquaculture has the ability to be seen in a remote area. It has constraints, access to markets and infrastructure,” says Johnston.
Phakisa streamlines marine-based business by creating industrial hubs. The hubs plan to cut time consuming environmental impact assessments as well as setting up infrastructure. In short, it means getting fisheries up faster and getting your legal documents signed off quicker.
The government plans to unlock the ocean economy in four areas: marine transport and manufacturing activities; offshore oil and gas exploration; aquaculture and marine protection services and ocean governance. In 2010, the ocean contributed around $4 billion to South Africa’s GDP and supported approximately 316,000 jobs. Government says the ocean has the potential to contribute up to $13 billion to the GDP and up to a million direct jobs. That’s more than twice the number of people in mining which creates more than half of South Africa’s exports.
The latest data released in the Aquaculture Yearbook 2014, by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, shows businesses in the seas are on the rise. In 2013, the value of the aquaculture sector, based on sales of products, grew by 38.1% to R696 million ($51 million). Of this, abalone production accounted for 76% of this at R529 million ($39 million). It’s a drop in the ocean compared to South Africa’s agriculture production, which was almost R188 million ($13.8 million) in 2013.
Johnston is a farmer at heart and looks like one – he wears a working shirt, shorts and shoes – and he has plenty of ideas to bring down costs. In the comfort of a coffee shop in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, on the outskirts of Hermanus, around 120 kilometers from Cape Town, we are in farming country. A hundred meters away is a farm that supplies half of the Western Cape with lettuce. On this farm Johnston is testing a new irrigation system that could produce even more. It’s a good place to muse about food, the sea and the future.
“The population is growing, [fish] catches are going down and the middle class is expanding. If you do the numbers you get a massive apparent basket of demand. That’s what’s driving the market. What’s missing is the economics behind it.”
“What people are talking about is 3,000 tons [of fish] a farm. That’s approximately 65 percent of the total wild catch of line fish in one year, in one farm.”
As we sit sipping coffee Johnston speaks passionately about a river fish in the Congo that lives off pig manure; he thinks it will feed millions of Africans by 2033. This hardy fish, called tilapia, can survive in sea and fresh water, it also feeds off algae and is cheap.
“This business is bigger than any farming operation in South Africa, and it’s a backyard operation. [African fisheries] are likely going to be lots of small guys who go and dig a dam; fill it up with water from the local river and throw in some pig manure so it goes green. I know guys who will harvest three tons a day. They have a pump; take it down to the market and just down the road, there is no ice, and they sell the whole thing. Gone,” says Johnston.
But, the rough South African seas make it difficult to farm large scale offshore.
“Most farming on large scale is done offshore, in those big fish cages. The reason is you have 100 tons of fish in one cage. You’ve got one boat that pumps feed in. The sea washes away the waste and thanks for coming.”
High density farming in tanks onshore is also a problem.
“You can have a disaster with water and in 10 minutes you will lose your product&#8230; But, the thinking at the moment [about Operation Phakisa] is there is going to be this large scale global market stuff. Whether it’s going to be the next mass production line, like chicken, I don’t know?” says Johnston.
You also need to choose the right fish to cover your costs. Farming hake, a fish that ends up on most South African plates, is pointless when it is far cheaper to catch.
“People are not going to pay R100 a kilogram for hake, and that’s the market that eats a lot of fish. The market that’s eating that nice little plate of fish, the upper tier market, that’s on MasterChef, that’s the market that will pay for the stuff. Those are the people will pay R150. So yes the equation is very nice. There are more people and there is less being caught. But there is a price point where people are saying that’s my limit.”
South Africa is a late entry into the game that has been played for centuries. It could take years before South African varieties appear on plates in international hotels.
“A lot of the fish producers have had to go big to get over that economy of scale. South Africans will only eat so much, so let’s export them. The question is to whom? Cod doesn’t exist on the international markets. They know all the international species. The Norwegian government must have spent so much money to make their salmon a dietary component of middle class citizens.”
Then there is the wild caught market, that is fish caught in the sea and not farmed, that can lower the price of your fish fillets in an instant.
“It’s a bit of a tragic assumption, because aquaculture is like any farming business. It thrives under a standard price, put a 20 percent mark-up and there’s your price. But the capture market isn’t like that. You don’t know what’s coming in tomorrow. Pilchards are caught in their millions of tons, can cost about R3 a kilogram. The cost of a kilogram of food to feed them in captivity is R20.”
Africa needs to get in on the action and one of its drawbacks is infrastructure, or the lack thereof. Johnston found out the hard way – he lost out on a $50-million cob farm in Mozambique when the gas came in.
“In Mozambique we got beaten out by oil and gas. We got there first. We got set up. It was unbelievable. The lead-up to it was amazing, and then it suddenly turned on us. The minister said that Mozambique was going to produce 70,000 tons of fish for $25 million. Then the gas came and unfortunately we were just in the same area, you can’t say no to $75 billion over the next 10 years.”
The problem in Africa is the supply chain and the local markets are few and far between, except for tilapia.
“Local markets are not going to support a high-value species. You need to build infrastructure, from roads to water, electricity to sanitation. You still need to have the same quality of high-level sanitation, whether it’s coming out of France or Djibouti.”
“Where farmers buy in seeds, in aquaculture you can’t buy eggs. You can’t just bring in seed stock. You need to have your own little hatchery, which adds its own little complexity.”
“The real nail in the coffin for most places is the regulatory requirement, intergovernmental agreements on health certifications. [Governments] just don’t set it up. [In Mozambique] everyone was ready. But the local government hadn’t done their paperwork. You can’t send [stock] out of the country. It can be as simple as your country’s veterinary authority not having done the health checks before it gets sent to Europe. Currently South Africa has the same problem. So you can farm your fish but you can’t sell them to Europe.”
Aquaculture may be a stormy business, but at least it’s in the swim.

The Buzzword That Could Change Africa Or  Crush Its Investors

“Some have meat and cannot eat,
Some cannot eat that want it,
But we have meat and we can eat,
So let the Lord be thankit.”
The Selkirk Grace is a prayer that is often recited in Scotland before a meal. It is a humble reminder to be thankful for the food you have to eat, because many people in the world are starving.
This is something the 49-year-old Nasar Rashid is almost evangelical about and the Selkirk Grace is somehow suitable for a man who exports dried fish heads from Scotland to Africa for people surviving on less than a dollar a day.
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Nasar’s decade-long struggle to set up Mapco, his fish-drying business, has been epic. He has suffered two heart attacks, the destruction of his quayside factory by a freak storm and the more mundane but equally difficult job of persuading people to back the philanthropic vision for his business.
Rashid grew up in Sheffield, England with dreams of becoming a professional footballer, he had a trial for Doncaster, but didn’t make it. His father, an academic, told him not only to pursue his passions, but also find a career he could fall back on. So Rashid headed to London, gained an accountancy degree and eventually become a certified chartered accountant. It has held him in good stead ever since.
“In 1998, I worked as a demand analyst with a British trading business. I bought commodities such as rice, biscuits and spices in India to sell in Africa,” says Rashid.
“Bombay was my first exposure to poverty and inequality. I stayed in a nice hotel but couldn’t adapt to the extreme inequality between rich and poor. Baby girls were left in the hotel garden in the hope they would be given a better life. But many just died.”
Rashid again witnessed extreme poverty when he was in Nigeria.
‘’I started investigating how these people sustained themselves and knew I had to do something.”
In 2000, Rashid went to work for a British charity. He researched the food sector and saw fish heads and frames being dried in the open in Iceland and sent to Africa as a cheap food. He soon gave up his job and went in search of fish.
“I met my friend Humek. We caught a coach in Lagos and visited 10 Nigerian importers of fish heads. I quickly saw that cities like Onitsha, Lagos and Aba were being supplied with low-grade product from Iceland.”
Cheap food such as fish heads can last up to two years without refrigeration.
“It was obvious that suppliers in Iceland couldn’t keep up with demand from Africa. I went to Iceland to research the supply chain and found the product could only be dried outside for three months in the year.”
Rashid started to research machinery to dehydrate fish heads indoors. To comply with European regulations, a closed-loop system was needed, which dealt with strong smells released during the process. No such technical solution existed and British companies refused to do the research and development work without guaranteed orders.
Hull University in England undertook an academic study but after 12 months, to Rashid’s disappointment, he was told that a closed-loop system wasn’t technically viable.
In 2002, Rashid suffered a heart attack. Shortly afterwards, he almost died after a second one and was only saved by a triple heart bypass operation. He was just 38.
For two years he was too ill to think of dried fish, but then he discovered a Canadian company in Iceland that made salt fish dryers. It agreed to build him a prototype in line with his research, and this time it worked.
Rashid had the technology, but needed to find funding and a location for the first plant. His family got him started and the Scottish government was keen for him to locate in Scotland, but all grant money from them had to be matched by the banks.
The banks didn’t take the project seriously, although to be fair, neither did the Scottish fishermen he approached. White fish offal, which includes the head, frame and guts, had never been used for anything other than bone meal in Scotland. And he was offering to buy it at a 40% premium.
In utter desperation, he contacted Michael Geoghegan, then chief executive at HSBC bank, by email.
“Geoghegan is the kind of man who made Britain great. The next day my phone never stopped ringing. An HSBC banker called Gordon Rennie then spent six months getting my loan sanctioned.”
Mapco looked at locations in Scotland, China and India, and decided that Peterhead, a white fish port near Aberdeen in the north east of Scotland, was the place.
“In 2010, we set up the first factory at minimal cost, overcame skepticism about the project by paying a premium to fish head suppliers, hired our core labor force—there are plenty of unemployed people in Peterhead—and started production.”
“We ramped up production, adding another dehydration machine every few months until we were employing 22 people. In the first year, we turned over $2.5 million, in the first eight months of the second year we did $3 million. We were dehydrating 100 tons of fish a month. Mapco were beginning to look at expanding into salmon, oily fish and other kinds of vegetables,” says Rashid.
All was going swimmingly until the night of December 14, when a freak storm battered the harbor at Peterhead.
“The harbor wall was destroyed and the factory devastated in minutes, with the factory meters deep in seawater and mountainous waves roaring over the top. My security guard ran to the top floor for safety and she couldn’t be rescued for hours as the gales ripped everything from the building,” says Rashid.
What was Rashid’s reaction when he first saw the devastation?
“No casualties? Then let’s get the factory rebuilt.”
Mapco had planning permission to rebuild a $6.4 million factory on the site. But Peterhead Port Authority, who leased the land to Mapco, threatened to take the land back. They had plans for a multi-million pound green energy scheme and a massive wind turbine. The Mapco rebuild was in the way.
After having established Scotland’s leading fish head dehydration plant as a viable business, local vested interests were set to bring Mapco down. Rashid contacted the local newspaper, the Press &amp; Journal, and his battle with the port authority was played out in public over the next couple of months.
“I never realized what a powerful thing the press could be. It attracted a lot of positive attention. The current first minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, is MP for Aberdeen, and he got involved and wrote me a letter of support. Now, I’ve got my land back and the town can see that I’m not a quitter.”
So, where is Mapco today? The port authority’s wind turbine planning application has been rejected and the Mapco factory is being rebuilt and, barring storms, should be dehydrating in the new year.
Rashid’s bold vision is not limited to fish heads. He is looking at dehydrating surplus vegetables and fruits that are rejected by European supermarkets because they are the wrong shape and size.
Just as we are saying goodbye, the patient and tenacious Rashid reveals the extent of his philanthropic vision.
“It was a great shame that my plans had to be postponed. My aim before the storm was to create a Mapco Foundation for African entrepreneurs with part of our profits going to the foundation. I’ve already had the Clinton Foundation visit me in Peterhead to help and give advice.”
By sending dehydrated food to Africa, Rashid is making his small contribution to putting food on the table for those less fortunate than him.

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Hooked On The Haul: Mauritius Makes Waves In Aquaculture

The Buzzword That Could Change Africa Or Crush Its Investors

A Fish Head For Business