Tom Seaman, editorial director of Undercurrent News, brings you a roundup of the main stories from the previous week.
As prices for shrimp in Ecuador are diving, production is set to drop in India amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to María Feijoo's sources, farmgate prices for large shrimp in Ecuador have fallen fast in less than two weeks, between $0.10 per kilogram and $0.40/kg for the latest harvest.
Meanwhile, although shrimp stocking has resumed in India over the past month, industry experts told Dan Gibson the country can expect a drop in production volume by 20-30% in 2020.
COVID-19 will drive a drop in farmed shrimp supply in 2020, but will also cause fundamental, longer-term changes to the market, said Jim Gulkin, the founder of Bangkok, Thailand-based Siam Canadian Group.
The pandemic is already having an impact on the US market. After months of anticipation that coronavirus would cause US shrimp imports to take a fall, evidence has finally arrived that it happened roughly two months ago, according to the latest update by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of its trade data.
The US imported 37,961 metric tons of shrimp worth $319.0 million in May, 29% less volume and 28% less value than imported in May 2019. That’s also well below the 51,733t worth $439.4m imported just one month before, in April 2020.
Despite the pandemic, Spanish frozen seafood association Conxemar is mulling a seafood show in Brussels, Belgium, the week before old rival Diversified Communications' Seafood Expo Global debuts in Barcelona.
Conxemar, which organizes a trade show in Vigo every year, plans to add a second show in 2021 in Brussels from April 18-20, where Diversified's flagship seafood event had been held for 28 editions. Diversified, based in Portland, in the US state of Maine, plans to hold the 29th edition of Seafood Expo Global in Barcelona, the capital of Spain's Catalan region, from April 27-29.
On Friday, Conxemar told me they will decide on the viability of the Brussels event in 2021 as well as the 2020 Vigo show held every year.
While many of advanced age across the United States have taken to largely sheltering in their homes and avoiding human interaction under self-imposed quarantines due to the pandemic, there's a strong chance that Carlos Rafael is now or soon will be living a similar existence.
The so-called "Codfather" of New Bedford, Massachusetts -- who was earlier convicted of overseeing a massive, organized fish fraud operation in New England in which more than 782,000 pounds of fish were mislabeled over a four-year period (2012-2015) -- has been moved from the Federal Medical Center, a prison in Devens, Massachusetts, to the Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) Residential Reentry Management Office, Scott Taylor, a Bureau of Prisons spokesperson, confirmed to Jason Huffman.
That means Rafael is either in home confinement or a residential reentry center, also known as a "halfway house", Taylor said.
Dan Gibson did an interesting interview with Abbas Lalljee, CEO of the UK's Reach Food Service.
Lalljee's business, like many distributors, was forced to transition in remarkably quick fashion during the onset of the UK's national lockdown in March. Reach's approach to the pandemic has been two-pronged. Firstly, his company has formed a home delivery service, named Reach My Kitchen, as it pivoted its model from B2B to B2C "on the fly".
Secondly, Lalljee's firm has formed a partnership with the restaurant chain Cote Brasserie, supplying all of the chain's transport and logistics for its own delivery service in Greater London. Reach is now in talks to provide logistics services to three more restaurant brands as a new revenue stream, he said.
Last month, the pandemic caused yellowfin tuna prices to dive €500-€550/t to around €1,800/t earlier in June. The drop in demand in foodservice, caused by the coronavirus pandemic, was cited as the cause. It seems slower fishing is now causing the prices to increase again.
The average prices for delivery of brine-frozen, whole round yellowfin (10-15kg) to canneries in Spain are at around €2,100/t with €2,200-€2,300/t seen coming for mid-July deliveries, sources told me.
Jason Smith and Matt Craze both reported interesting developments in recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) for salmon.
In the last few weeks, there has been an explosion in activity among start-up companies that are building land-based salmon farms at coastal locations using flow-through technology in Norway, Matt Craze reported.
These projects are incorporating some of the modern technology found in recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS), but bypassing the complex area of using biofilters to recycle water.
In the US, AquaBounty Technologies, a genetically modified salmon pioneer from Maynard, Massachusetts, has harvested its first conventional Atlantic salmon from its Albany, Indiana, RAS facility, Jason Smith reported.
The company is growing the conventional Atlantics -- as distinct from its genetically modified AquAdvantage salmon, which is also being grown in segregated tanks at the facility and preparing for harvest by the end of the year -- as a way to "fine-tune" operations at the RAS site, CEO Sylvia Wulf said.
AquaBounty aims to sell 100 metric tons of conventional Atlantics monthly by early 2021, primarily into foodservice customers but possibly some "independent" retailers as well, Wulf said.
July 06, 2020 at 04:04PM
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Editor's recap: Ecuador shrimp prices dive, production in India set to fall; Conxemar organizer mulls Brussels show - Undercurrent News
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