India’s shrimp exports have dropped below 2022 levels, and there are signs of a smaller first crop this year, signaling trouble for the powerhouse commodity of the country’s seafood industry.
“A market correction seems to be underway,” Willem van der Pijl, the founder of consultancy Shrimp Insights, wrote in a recent blog post.
A large crop harvested in Q4 2022, combined with lower global demand, has resulted in a crash in prices, according to van der Pijl.
“Some may have expected that India’s financial year export volume in 2022–2023 would have been much lower than it was. The less dramatic figures resulted from the large volume of raw material harvested in Q4 2022, when farmers had already stocked their ponds before prices collapsed,” he wrote. “The export volume in Q1 2023 reached 131,766 MT, up 16 percent compared to 2022. While the volume was up, prices spiraled down.”
Average export prices dropped to USD 6.53 [EUR 5.96] per kilogram for raw vannamei in December 2022, while value-added shrimp products saw their average per-kilo value hit USD 9.15 [EUR 8.35] in February 2023, and raw monodon prices reached USD 9.18 [EUR 8.37] per kilo in March 2023.
India’s seafood exports reached USD 8.09 billion (EUR 7.41 billion) in its most recent fiscal year, up 4.31 percent year-over-year for April 2022 to March 2023, with shrimp accounting for USD 5.48 billion (EUR 5.02 billion), down from USD 5.83 billion (EUR 5.34 billion) in the 2021-2022 fiscal year.
India exported 719,357 metric tons over that time period, down from the 734,375 MT it exported the previous year. A 4 percent drop in exports of raw vannamei shrimp 560,778 MT exported was responsible for most of the decline.
But while India’s shipments exports to China and other Asian markets increased, its shipments to the U.S. have tumbled. Year to date through May 2023, India had exported 84,217 MT of shrimp to the U.S., down from 120,884 MT through the first five months of 2022.
In April 2023, India’s total raw vannamei exports dropped more than 5,000 MT below the year-over-year total, from 45,741 MT in 2022 to 40,248 MT in April 2023. Its value-added exports also dropped in the month – a telling sign as value-added shrimp exports were up 10 percent by volume in 2021-2022, reaching 67,232 MT total.
“The drop in exports may finally be the first sign that the output of India’s first crop has dropped, which would be in line with the strongly declined broodstock import numbers (from December 2022 to May 2023 down 33 percent compared to the same period a year before),” van der Pijl wrote. “Luckily, amidst slower production, export prices seem to have reached their lowest level.”
While total production remains low, more Indian shrimp farmers appear to be shifting to P. monodon, or black tiger shrimp. Year-to-date production reached 8,511 MT up from 3,200 MT in the prior year.
“This is a sign that, although slower than some people in the Indian farming fraternity may have expected, an increasing number of farmers is using the improved availability of domesticated healthy and fast-growing P. monodon post-larvae.”
Photo courtesy of weera sreesam/Shutterstock
