Irish seafood exports to China have fallen thus far in 2022.
Between January and August 2022, Ireland’s seafood exports to China – a category that includes Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan – were valued at EUR 19 million (USD 18.6 million), an 8 percent year-over-year decline, according to data from Bord Bia, Ireland’s food marketing agency Bord Bia.
Yet during the same period, Irish shellfish shipments to China rose by 11 percent to EUR 9.9 million (USD 9.9 million), even as shipments of what Bord Bia terms “pelagic seafood” fell by 23 percent. Shipments of Irish freshwater seafood to China totaled EUR 87,000 (USD 85,000) in the period, a drop of 27 percent.
It is not clear to what extent the figures are driven by higher prices or increased volume. But what’s clear is that the growth in demand is in the European Union rather than China.
From January to the end of August 2022, Irish seafood exports to the E.U. were valued at EUR 224.2 million (USD 219.7 million), a 7 percent increase on the same period of 2021. Irish shellfish exports were worth EUR 100 million (USD 98 million), up 17 percent year-on-year, and freshwater seafood exports were valued at EUR 61 million (USD 59.7 million), up 7 percent, in that timeframe. Shipments of Irish pelagic products to the E.U. in the first nine months of 2022 were worth EUR 36.6 million (USD 35.8 million), down 14 percent, while exports of whitefish rose 2 percent to EUR 26.5 million (USD 25.9 million).
However, major Irish exporters of oysters and shellfish have turned away from a more risky Chinese market in favor of sales to a recovering European market. Belles Isle CEO Des Moore, who had focused on shipments to China prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, that most of Ireland’s oyster producers have not ventured back into China “as there are too many variables that aren’t stable.”
"Prices are going up and up and Europe is [now] the focus,” he said.
Bord Bia has used it Origin Green logo – an in-house sustainability marketing scheme – to promote Ireland as a source of safe, pure seafood, targeted at the high end of China’s market. But the long-term viability of the Origin Green mark was called into question recently by a report from the country’s Environmental Protection Authority, which blamed a large expansion in dairy farming for continued deterioration in the water quality of Ireland’s rivers and coastal waterways.
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