KARACHI: Hopes for the country’s seafood export growth to reach multi-billion-dollar were dashed in the just-ended fiscal year, nose diving over 17 percent, exporters said on Friday.
Fresh figures mirror a gloomy state of the country’s seafood export, falling by 17.36 percent to $410 million in the fiscal year 2023-24, exporters cited the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics.
The entire sector’s hopes, which exporters had pinned on the new government’s “blue economy”, completely fell apart with dismal growth prospects for one more year. The blue economy envisaged to enable the fisheries sector as a major export contributor, they added.
The towering claims about a new legislation to help export the aquaculture products from April 2024 to the world markets has highly failed to grow the entire sector with a multi-billion-dollar global trade, exporters criticized.
Not a single shipment of the aquaculture products was made since the announcement, whereas the country drastically lost its traditional seafood export, they added. The fiscal year 2022-2023 saw a record seafood export growth to 214,367 metric tons valuing $496.31 million but the country failed to sustain the uptrend, nose diving to 200,709 metric tons or $410.27 million last fiscal year, they said. Decrease in the average unit price from $2.32 a kilogram to $2.04 is seen as a devastating factor to pull down the country’s seafood export in 2023-24.
“The Southeast Asian market ran stagnation last year,” hurting the country’s fisheries trade with major nations, former Vice President for Pakistan Fisheries Exporters Association (PAKFEA), Saeed Fareed said.
China stopped buying seafood from previously its major trading nations since it has grown huge stocks last year, he said that the Chinese market still stands closed, making Pakistan suffer with big export losses.
Seafood products like squid a major export to the Chinese market have lost their value over the years; he said that an average price would range between $6 and $7 a kilogram in 2022-2023, which slumped to $2 to $3 a kilogram this year.
He said that a big fall in squids prices have also destabilized its local market with a lowering return for fishermen. Thailand, which Pakistan targets as a major export venue, also stopped buying seafood from the country after India and Oman flooded its markets with the commodity, he said.
The oversupply from the completing nations have also devalued Pakistan’s seafood products on Thailand’s markets, which now offer prices lower than expectations, Saeed Fareed, who is also a leading fisheries export, said.
“Pakistan’s limited global market access made its seafood export suffer losses last fiscal year,” former Director General, Marine Fisheries Department and Technical Advisor, WWF-Pakistan, Muhammad Moazzam Khan said.
The country makes its major seafood export share to China, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, besides small quantities of chilled fish to the nations in the Persian Gulf; he said that shipments are limited to the EU countries - a globally lucrative market. Before 2005, he said that the EU would import bulks of kiddi from Pakistan for reprocessing as “salad” cooked shrimp but now these products are reprocessed in Southeast Asia- a market where the country is faced with a cutthroat competition from India and Bangladesh. In addition, he said, Ecuador is offering the Southeast Asian market with its aquaculture shrimp. Pakistan’s only few factories are permitted to export small quantities of freshwater fish to the EU, which is also a setback to this sector, he added.
Failing to comply with Turtle Excluder Device (TED) regulation also made the US place blanket ban on Pakistan’s shrimp import, further dwindling a market access for the country to lose its export share.
The high operational costs against low returns have forced several fishermen and boat owners groups to threaten to shut down seafood hunts and stop landing at the harbor, which also affected the local market. They insisted on a demand for determining a support price for the catch at the start of new fishing season that begins on August 1. In response, exporters told them that demand and supply for the commodity determines its value on the market and it was unlikely for them to fix a produce price without its global appeal.
Moazzam Khan said that “the prices at the landing centres remained low in 2023-2024 because of a glut in the international market which is evident from the present decrease in the seafood export earnings”.
A large scale of shrimp farming is the only way left to feed the country’s seafood export factories in a bid to expand their reducing global market share, he suggested, warning that “the growing raw material shortage for the processing factories will stamp out the country from global competition”.
The former DG, MFD appreciated the private sector for its hard work to initiate the shrimp farming, urging them to speed up their efforts to control the export losses. He also sought a legislation to help meet with the TED specification to end the US shrimp ban.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
Comments
Comments are closed.