Wholesale seafood prices in China rose 4.9 percent year-on-year in February 2022, above the 0.9 rise in the country’s overall consumer price index.
This continues a trend of rising seafood prices that has stretched over several months – average seafood prices rose 8.8 percent in January 2022 and 7.9 percent in December 2021, according to the National Bureau of Statistics data.
The rising cost of inputs and tighter access for imports are the primary contributors to the price hikes, according to Landy Chow, the general manager of seafood importer Siam Canadian’s China office. Prices for various species in China are going up – especially for sea bass and squid – in part due to the impact of rising feed and fuel prices and as tilapia is being substituted for imported pangasius, which is facing supply problems due to more-stringent COVID-19 import controls, according to Chow. In response, tilapia prices are also going up in China, with strong demand from both export markets and the domestic market, he said.
“Unusually cold weather in the past two weeks has postponed the country’s tilapia harvest and reduced the scale of the harvest,” he told SeafoodSource. “Recently, Chinese factories are promoting an item roasted fish, which uses tilapia."
Chow also attributed the higher prices to a significant increase in soybean prices.
Higher seafood prices appear to be prompting a surge in smuggling. In the shrimp-farming region of Zhanjiang, four separate smuggling rings were broken up in February alone. Chinese authorities have leveled accusations against them of bringing high-value species including hairtail and octopus into the country though falsification of trade information, such as the weight, price, and place of origin of the seafood. Combined the smuggling rings were estimated to have been responsible for smuggling CNY 2.4 billion (USD 384 million, EUR 336 million) worth of seafood into China annually through the regions of Beijing, Fujian, Guangdong, and Shandong, and evading CNY 200 million (USD 31.6 million, EUR 29.8 million) in taxes.
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