Joep Kleine Staarman

Aquaculture management is built on scale, supply and stewardship being held together at once, and since 2020 Joep Kleine Staarman has been Managing Director of Aquaculture M&A Consult in Singapore. His work has consistently sat at the point where commerce meets consequence, shaped by a stated starting point: “The whole thing started with food security and the sense of availability, plus of course sustainability.” That frame is reflected in the shape of the career itself. Training at INSEAD, Wageningen University, and Rijksuniversiteit Groningen / University of Groningen gave Joep Kleine Staarman a base for operating across aquaculture’s international markets, and the path that followed moved in stages rather than leaps. The pattern is one of sector fluency built through successive leadership posts, each carrying broader operational responsibility. Co-founding Catvis in 1985 and serving as Managing Director through 1992 set the template: build the business, then run it. The same holds in the next posts, with Joep Kleine Staarman as Managing Director at Salmontrutta from 1992 to 1997, and then Managing Director at Skretting from 1997 to 2005. Across those years, the work remained centered on leadership with an operational view wide enough to account for production and demand at the same time. Regional scale became the next layer of the craft. As Managing Director Asia Pacific at Marine Harvest from 2004 to 2008, Joep Kleine Staarman operated inside a wider geography that demanded both precision and perspective. The role sits squarely in a part of the industry where distribution, resilience and access are not side issues but core operating concerns. Ownership and management converged at Barramundi Asia, where Joep Kleine Staarman served as co-owner and Managing Director from 2008 to 2020. That long tenure points to continuity, but also to the discipline required to guide a company over time while holding both executive and ownership responsibilities. He later moved into a senior advisory role at FlyFarm Worldwide from 2021 to 2023, extending that experience into a more consultative register. Since 2020, the Singapore appointment at Aquaculture M&A Consult has remained the current base. It fits a career defined by movement across companies, regions and stages of growth, while staying anchored to the same central concern: building a food system that is dependable, responsible and fit for the future.