Prices for salmon roe in Russia are hitting historic highs, despite the second-most successful salmon season in the last decade.
An upward trend on salmon roe in the Russian market started in November 2020, following a poor salmon season. Steady price growth in the subsequent months appeared to be the result of the supply crunch, with a 30 percent hike in prices in April 2021.
In the latter half of 2021, the Russian Federal Agency for Fisheries voiced its expectation that a robust supply of salmon roe from the near-record salmon season would drive prices down.
“A large volume of salmon was caught, so supply will be good. It will cause the prices to drop,” Russian Federal Agency for Fisheries Head Ilya Shestakov said in September, after Russian fisheries caught 538,000 metric tons (MT) of salmon, business journal RBC reported.
The forecast of 27,000 to 30,000 MT of salmon roe harvested from the robust salmon harvest was expected to entirely cover Russia’s annual domestic consumption of 12,000 to 18,000 MT.
However, the market moved in the opposite direction. According to data from the Russian Federal Agency for Statistics (Rosstat), the average retail price for salmon roe in October was RUB 5,000 (USD 67.90, EUR 59.90) per kilogram, a historic high. In December, prices rose further still to RUB 6,000 (USD 81.60, EUR 71.90), with the New Year holiday expected to push prices even higher.
All-Russian Association of Fishing Industry (VARPE) President German Zverev wrote in a column in Rossiyskaya Gazeta that traders are afraid of possible disruptions to logistics, forcing them to enhance prices to compensate for potential losses caused by supply chain problems.
Another factor is a poor salmon season in Japan, the biggest consumer market of salmon roe. Japanese traders bought large volumes of salmon roe from Russia, tightening the supply and driving up prices.
From 2018 to 2021, the price of salmon roe has increased from RUB 3,000 (USD 40.80, EUR 35.90) to RUB 5,000 (USD 67.98, EUR 59.9), Rosstat calculated. Since the year 2000 – when Rosstat first started monitoring salmon roe prices – through November 2021 the price has grown 7.4 times, starting at just RUB 675 (USD 9.17, EUR 8.00) per kilogram.
Currently, the average Russian can buy, for their entire monthly salary, just six kilograms of the product. In comparison, the retail price for salmon grew only 16 percent from October 2020 to October 2021.
Photo courtesy of Nishihama/Shutterstock
