The Global Aquaculture Alliance (GAA) is taking its Global Outlook for Aquaculture Leadership (GOAL) conference online this year, in the wake of coronavirus uncertainties.

The conference was scheduled to take place live this October in Tokyo, Japan. Instead, the conference will be held virtually from Oct. 6 to Oct. 8, with six to eight program sessions occurring throughout the week.

“The silver lining of this terrible COVID-19 cloud is the unifying force of virtual meetings," GAA Founder and President George Chamberlain said.

"This presents new opportunities to broadly share the latest information and advances to accelerate progress toward our collective goal of responsibly producing more healthful seafood.”

GAA still plans to host the event in Tokyo, Japan, in 2021, with dates yet to be announced.

Last year, the annual conference took place in Chennai, India -- look back at the main discussions here.

The cancellation of the live event joins a list of seafood trade shows and conferences that have either canceled or been rescheduled this year because of restrictions resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.

Diversified Communications, organizers of Seafood Expo North America (SENA) and Seafood Expo Global (SEG) is still holding out hope it can pull off SENA, which the company has rescheduled for Sept. 23 – 24, after postponing the annual March event. It canceled its annual SEG event in Brussels, which it had earlier rescheduled from April to June.

Many areas in the United States and around the world are carefully beginning to relax lockdown restrictions implemented to control the spread of the coronavirus. Many companies, however, still have in place travel restrictions for employees, which could severely limit attendance at the show, which draws a large number of attendees and exhibitors from overseas.

Diversified stands to lose an estimate $35 million in revenue from the cancellation of both events.

In April, the Nor-Fishing Foundation announced canceled Nor-Fishing 2020, which was set for August in Trondheim, Norway.

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