With China rushing to get ready for Chinese New Year celebrations on 1 February, anxieties over COVID-19 appear to have dampened seafood prices and shifted trade online.
Prices for shrimp are down, according to a special report on the pre-festival seafood trade on CCTV2, China Central TV’s business channel. Vendors in Zhanjiang, the hometown of Guolian Aquatic, told CCTV prices for 500 grams of locally farmed shrimp were as low as CNY 20 (USD 3.20, EUR 2.80), half the rate seen two years ago.
However, a spokesperson for online retailer JD.com told CCTV his company had in the past month increased its sourcing of Zhanjiang shrimp by 213 percent compared to the month prior to Chinese New Year in 2021, an indication seafood sales are shifting online as consumers avoid brick-and-mortar marketplaces.
The CCTV program showed Zhanjiang seafood producers waiting for space on cold-chain trucks supplying online retailers and community group-buying sites like Xingsheng Youxuan and Shihui Tuan. These platforms are built around community leaders who coordinate orders through a WeChat group and get paid on commission.
Imported seafood has taken the brunt of the Chinese government’s clampdown on products they fear may be carrying COVID-19, with enhanced food safety measures combining with public wariness over the virus to drive down both supply and demand. Going against the consensus of global health organization COVID-19 spreads through respiratory droplets from infected people, China continues to insist the virus is being spread through infection from packaging on goods sent from abroad. State media has constantly highlighted the risk of boxes containing imported seafood and other chilled foods.
In the most recent example of the impact of China’s ongoing enforcement measures, on 20 January, five Vietnamese exporters of pangasius and other seafood products were barred from the Chinese market for two weeks after the detection of what Chinese Customs said were traces of the virus on found on their items’ packaging. The suspension was handed down under China’s regulation 103, which was introduced in 2020 to punish firms whose packaging showed traces of COVID-19. Chinese Customs claims it had already made “urgent warnings to the affected companies to improve prevention measures” on 6, 8, and 19 January.
More recently, a major seafood market in Shanghai, the Oriental International Seafood Market, has required that any seafood from outside the boundaries of Zhejiang province be warehoused and tested on arrival at the market. And authorities in Shandong have named 20 enterprises – most of them food stores – found to not be fully implementing the province’s food safety regulations on imported cold-chain goods. The enhanced measures required all imported food enter centralized supervision warehouses for testing and disinfection and then must be traceable at all times using QR codes. Eight requirements of the "Shandong Cold Chain" system include center on storage and “24-hour traceability” – an added cost that some smaller retailers have struggled to absorb.
Photo courtesy of Adamlee01/Shutterstock
