The Virginia Israel Advisory Board’s (VIAB) “Project Jonah” land-based fish farm in Southwest Virginia’s Tazewell and Russell counties has been suspended. Del. Will Morefield, a Republican from Tazewell County attributes the bad news to fuel price increases driven by the US-Israel war on Iran as well as high tariffs on imported equipment.
Israel’s US lobby the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) sent Morefield on a trip to Israel in January 2015. According to Morefield, “the project was first initiated…when he was selected by the to be part of an official delegation of elected officials and business leaders representing the US to travel to Israel.” The VIAB project was designed entirely around an inexperienced Israeli fish farm technology company AquaMaof which acquired its technology from a Minnesota inventor.
The only actual construction work on the project, which shifted location from a distant but flood prone site on the Clinch River water treatment facility to the scenic valley below Southwest Virginia Community College, is a 200-acre acre dirt scar.
The operator shifted from tilapia production in competition with a native Virginia company to salmon and rebranded as “Pure Salmon. More recently Project Jonah shifted to trout as AquaMaof suffered credibility losses due to fish kills and lawsuits. Local taxpayers strongly opposed the secrecy of VIAB and development officials as well as the misdirection of taxpayer resources to Project Jonah.
The company in the past said the farm would employ more than 200 workers. However key funders included a United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund and bevy of quasi governmental grants contingent on performance.
Ironically, the US-Israeli war on Iran, strongly backed for decades by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and AIPAC looks to have killed off UAE funding as Persian Gulf energy exporters struggle to ship product to markets and cancel discretionary projects.
See https://www.israellobby.org/ProjectJonah/ for details about AIPAC and VIAB’s secretive Project Jonah.