Industry Events
THE TAIWAN INTERNATIONAL FISHERIES AND SEAFOOD SHOW 2018
SETTING THE DIRECTION FOR SEAFOOD PRODUCTION AND PROCESSING IN ASIA
T
aiwan is a major fishery nation within the Asian region and ranks 12th in the value for fish catch and has the 17th largest aquaculture industry globally. It remains the world leader with the most foreign fishing vessels based at its port and Kaohsiung is the dominate port. The Taiwan International Fisheries and Seafood Show 2018 was jointly organised by the Taiwan External Trade Department Council TAITRA and My Exhibition and held in the attractive facilities of the Kaohsiung Exhibition Centre in late November 2018. It was the fourth annual exhibition attracting more than 161 exhibitors from 18 countries and featuring over 327 booths. It aimed to attract some 7000 visitors and achieved that with 594 overseas visitors together with 6284 local visitors over the full three days. It was co-hosted alongside the ‘Cross-Strait Fisheries and Seafood Show’. Kaohsiung is an important international fisheries harbour at the southern end of Taiwan’s principle island and plays a significant role in the country’s high-yielding fish production and industrial chain. The show - a combination of both fisheries and aquaculture highlights the shift from capture fisheries to farmed fish while acknowledging that both are important industries relying on the development of new technologies to survive and grow economically. “The exhibition integrates the entire upstream and downstream industry chain, including the areas of fishing equipment and technology, aquaculture, seafood including value-added seafood, fish processing
equipment and all areas involved in the fishery industry chain,” says Lrene Liu, General Manager of MyExhibition. “We can see not only the leading manufacturers such as King Chou Marine technology, Genius Electronic Optical, Anyong Biotechnology, Blutech and Chihful Fishery Enterprise but also for the first time the \ Youth of Taiwan’ to bring in the new kinetic energy of the younger generations innovation at this year’s exhibition.” Over 100 major young breeders led by Taiwan’s ‘Queen of Milkfish’ Lu Jingying, shared their experiences and showed the diversification in current developments throughout the industry. “The World Aquaculture Techniques and Marketing Outlook seminars attracted some 200 businesses and covered a selection of hot topics from breeding, water recycling, aquatic marketing to virus solutions.” Like many specialist exhibitions, TIFSS hosted one-to-one ‘’procurement meetings’ and invited 19 domestic and 65 international buyers from a range of Asia countries to interact with exhibitions to establish an ‘international market expansion pipeline’ to effectively increase bilateral transactions values generated by the event. The top 10 overseas buyers were: Vietnam, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Philippines, USA and India. Another feature of the 2018 event was the novel display of Taiwan’s marine culture and art zone. Visitors saw displays of ‘Lost Atlantis an underwater city and grouper lanterns along with ‘Blue Dancer’ by Art Fish that showed the uniqueness and charm of Taiwan’s islands. Next year’s event will be held almost two months earlier that has been the chosen dates up until now. In 2019 the TFSS will be held from Thursday-Saturday, September 26-28, 2019.
60 | January 2019 - International Aquafeed