The biggest impact on Chile’s salmon sector will not come from the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, but rather from the low prices the sector is being forced to sell at, according to Arturo Clement, the president of industry association SalmonChile.
“The impact is going to be from the low prices at which we are selling. It will be a negative economic result, but we are confident that if the situation tends to normalize, prices will recover,” he told La Tercera.
The drop in prices in the United States “responds to a conjunctural, temporary situation,” Clement said.
“Today, a large part of the demand is concentrated in the U.S. market, which has affected the price, but once the markets normalize, we will have a better price performance,” he said.
Calling the current global trading situation “tremendously complex and unstable,” Clement said Chile’s salmon sector has continued exporting, keeping outflow constant, despite fluctuating prices. Due to increased health and safety measures put in place in response to COVID-19, Chile’s salmon industry is operating at about 85 percent capacity and “we hope that once the health crisis is over, companies will quickly return to normal operations and actively contribute to the social and economic revival of the country.”
SalmonChile members believe that the industry will fully recover in the second half of the year, ending 2020 with export levels comparable to 2019, Clement said. The ISA crisis suffered by the sector in 2013 was more threatening than COVID-19, as the former saw the mass deaths of biomass, while the latter is “logistically complex” but fish are healthy and the situation will come to an end, Clement said.
Clement acknowledged some salmon shipments from Chile to China were recently diverted to other countries as a result of the Chinese response to false reports linking imported salmon to a COVID-19 outbreak in Beijing. But shipments to China have resumed and activity is recovering weekly, he said.
“Obviously, we are looking for solutions, because it is a market that interests us and in which we want to continue growing,” he said.
Clement praised the industry’s low level of coronavirus infections thanks to the safety measures it has implemented, and he underlined the association’s “Committed to the South” campaign, whereby 73 sector companies support the communities in which they work through a CLP 1.8 billion (USD 2.2 million, EUR 1.9 million) solidarity fund.
Photo courtesy of Cliff White/SeafoodSource
