The Indonesian shrimp industry is bouncing back after multiple months of lower export totals in the wake of its “radioactive shrimp” crisis, but exports will still be at a multi-year low in 2026.
Data from Statistics Indonesia shared during the Global Shrimp Forum – and gathered by the forum’s managing director and co-founder Willem van der Pijl – indicate Indonesia’s shrimp exports began to decline year over year in Q3 2025, and have remained depressed ever since. The decline lines up with a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory of possible radioactive contamination of shrimp shipments from the country, which was later confirmed and linked to contamination at a steel plant.
The impact on exports was immediately obvious, with declines in October 2025 linked to the incident. According to the data gathered by van der Pijl, those declines are only recently beginning to ease.
“We can clearly see in the statistics, in October 2025, you can see a sharp drop in exports to the U.S. when the radioactive shrimp and the FDA decision came into play,” van der Pijl said. “This year, we can see that exports in the beginning struggled, but the situation is actually getting a little bit back to normal.”
According to the data, Indonesia’s shrimp exports were down by 14 percent in Q4 2025 and a further 17 percent in Q1 2026. The decline continued into Q2 2026, with exports again down 9 percent year over year – though that is also compared to a period when Indonesia saw large growth in 2025.
The statistics for the second half of 2025 will likely show improvement – but that is also being compared to the down period when exports were affected by the FDA’s discovery, van der Pijl said.
Even with a normalization of exports to the U.S., van der Pijl said Indonesia may end 2026 with less than 200,000 metric tons (MT) of shrimp exported, a low that was last seen in 2018.
The reason for the decline is largely the high dependence the Indonesian shrimp industry has on the U.S. as a market, with nearly 65 to 70 percent of its shrimp going to the country. During the issues with the U.S., Indonesia saw growth in the E.U. and Chinese markets to compensate, but that growth almost immediately slowed down when the U.S. market opened back up.
Aris Utama, the head of sales and marketing for Bumi Menara Internusa, said the statics point out Indonesia’s dependence on the U.S. and its decreasing contribution to global shrimp exports.
“We can see that by our 2025 number we were probably contributing about 5.35 percent of the global shrimp exports, which is rather low,” Utama said.
In light of the flat exports, the Indonesian government is taking steps to try and boost the shrimp industry, he said.
Indonesia set high export targets in 2020, hoping to achieve over 360,000 MT of exports by 2024. However, those goals never materialized, and the country’s exports have decreased since a high of 243,000 MT in exports in 2021.
Utama said the government is working to start increasing the farming of shrimp, and in two locations it is promoting shrimp aquaculture with a combined output of over 50,000 MT of production.
“That would help bring Indonesia back above 200,000 MT in exports per year,” Utama said.
