Based on the first three quarters of 2018, shrimp export volumes from India still show a year-on-year increase of 23 percent, already totaling 460,000 tons by the end of September. However, after a stunning 72 percent year-on-year increase in June, this increase more or less halved to 38 percent in July, then dropped further to a year-on-year growth of one percent in August and even a 22 percent year-on-year decline in volume in September.
After having seen an upward farm gate price trend until the end of October, from the first week of November, when harvests of the winter crop started, farm gate prices began decreasing. As noted in the third edition of ShrimpTails, it seems that November harvests have indeed arrived too late to cater to the European and U.S. Christmas season, forcing exporters to sell at lower prices. We expect that prices continue to decrease until the end of 2018, when the harvest of the winter crop will be wrapped up, picking up at least moderately through the first quarter of 2019 when not much shrimp will be harvested. What will then happen depends on the magnitude of India’s first crop of 2019 coming to the market from April onwards.
