China's appetite for lobster boosts prices in Maine
Demand for North American lobster, with its “good luck” red color and savory taste, is skyrocketing in China, along with prices.
The United States and Canada both are benefitting, according to Bloomberg.
China has no lobster industry of its own, and had relied mostly on Australian imports until the catch began shrinking.
The 2012 glut of lobster in the Gulf of Maine caused prices to plummet, making Maine lobster more attractive to people halfway around the world, according to the news service.
Maine lobstermen caught 123.3 million pounds of lobster during the 2012 season, which represents a 15% increase from 2011 and an 88% increase from landings two decades ago, according to Maine Department of Marine Resources figures quoted in a July 2013 Mainebiz article. The glut in the market drove prices down to the lowest lobstermen had seen in 18 years.
“When the domestic market collapsed, we looked farther and farther” for buyers, Stephanie Nadeau told Bloomberg. She said she shipped 2.5 million pounds last year by air to China for The Lobster Co. in Arundel. “I never sold a lobster to China until 2010. It was the really low price and the dealer’s desperation here because we had high catches and a god-awful economy. We had to move the lobster.”
U.S. exports to China rose to 8,560 metric tons (18.9 million pounds) last year, up 22-fold from 2009, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. Shipments already are up 12 percent in 2015.
Seafood was Maine's leading export in 2014, with its total value of $456.67 million topping the No. 2 export commodity of paper and pulp products by almost $100 million. And the biggest driver of seafood's rise to the top of the state's export commodity chart, Jeffrey Bennett of the Maine International Trade Center told Mainebiz in a May 2015 article, is that tasty two-clawed crustacean harvested by hundreds of independent fishermen in the Gulf of Maine, the Maine lobster.Lobster accounts for almost $366 million of those exports and its overall total export value increased by a whopping 45.4% between 2013 and 2014 among the 25 countries buying Maine lobsters, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau's foreign trade division.
China’s middle class may surge to 1 billion people by 2030 from about 150 million last year, boosting incomes that will drive demand for all kinds of higher-value foods, including crustaceans, Abhay Sinha, a senior food and retail analyst at London-based researcher Technavio, told Bloomberg. The country already consumes 35% of the world’s seafood, and by 2019 will boost consumption of all crustaceans, including crab and shrimp, by 50% from last year.
Read more
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments