Eight Ecuadorian shrimp-farming firms have been reauthorized to export products to China, Ecuador’s National Chamber of Aquaculture (CNA) announced in a statement.
When contacted by SeafoodSource, CNA said it was not at liberty to disclose the names of the companies involved or the reason why the firms were barred from exporting to China to begin with. Some had been on China’s no-import list since October 2025 and others from January 2026 onward.
Though the decision still left another six Ecuadorian shrimp firms on China’s no-import list, CNA Executive President José Antonio Camposano celebrated the decision as “the result of joint public-private work and the efforts made during several months to regain access to the Chinese market.”
“We recognize the lifting of the suspension of these eight plants as a step forward, and we hope that the dialogue with Chinese authorities will [help to resolve] the situation of the other six Ecuadorian plants that are still suspended,” he said in a social media post.
China is by far Ecuador’s largest export market for farmed shrimp.
Ecuador’s farmed shrimp industry closed 2025 with USD 7.47 billion (EUR 6.3 billion) in exports by value, which was up 23.2 percent year over year, and 3.07 billion pounds of exports by volume, marking a 15.1 percent increase.
China took up nearly half of that export pie at 49.5 percent of volume, receiving 1.52 billion pounds of Ecuadorian shrimp last year worth USD 3.27 billion (EUR 2.76 billion).
The two next largest export markets, Europe and the United States, received 21.7 percent and 19.4 percent, respectively, of Ecuador’s shrimp exports in 2025.
The decision from China also comes as the U.S. hit Ecuador with a 10 percent tariff on all goods for an alleged failure to enforce prohibitions on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.
