BAIRD, Miss. – Turning a problem into a money maker is the plan announced Tuesday by Moon River Foods. The company is based in China and they are setting up a facility in Sunflower County to harvest and process Asian carp from the Mississippi River. The company also plans to hire 100 people to do the job.
Asian carp have been a problem species in the Mississippi River for decades. They were originally brought over in the 1970s to control weeds and parasites. Today there are breeding populations of the fish in the Mississippi River and they are threatening freshwater ecosystems, taking over entire lakes and streams.
Moon River Foods’s plan is to contract with fishermen, harvest 25 million pounds of the carp annually, and export the majority of them to China where they are a staple food.
