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China’s ban making seafood processors miserable
Hundreds of seafood processing companies have complained that they are thirsty for materials as fishing boats have been staying ashore because of China’s imposition of a fishing ban on some traditional fishing grounds of Vietnam.
Fishing boats staying ashore, businesses thirsty for materials
General Director of Da Nang-based Thuan Phuoc Seafood and Trade Company Tran Van Linh said: “Since China’s fishing ban, fishermen in the central region dare not go out to the sea to do fishing. As a result, processing workshops like ours are in desperate need of materials.”
Linh related that Chinese merchants are trying to purchase all the fish farmers have caught at any cost. Therefore, seafood processing companies in the central region have nearly no materials for processing.
According to enterprises, as materials from the sea have become scarce, they have turned to rely on cultivated materials, like white shrimp. However, the prices of white shrimp have unexpected soared from 39-40,000 dong per kilogramme to 45,000 dong per kilogramme, even higher than the prices in the Cuu Long River Delta’s shrimp granary. It is because Chinese businessmen also have been hunting for shrimp, accepting to pay high prices. Linh said these businessmen always pay 3,000-5,000 dong per kilogramme more than Vietnamese enterprises.
“We arrived at the Mong Cai border gate and we saw a lot of white shrimp and seafood there waiting to go to China. If the current problems cannot be settled, not only businesses in the central region, but ones in the southern region will also suffer,” said the director of a seafood company.
The director added that the problems have outstripped the capability of enterprises and the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP).
Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Luong Le Phuong and Deputy Chairman of VASEP Nguyen Huu Dung both said that the ministry would send a delegation of officials to the central region to check on the situation of fishermen and processing workshops to suggest measures to the Government.
What solutions?
Seafood processing companies in the central region say that they are targeting the southern market for materials. However, in fact, enterprises in the south are also lacking materials themselves. The An Giang-based Navico, for example, a big name in seafood industry, which for many years has led the country in seafood exports, and has three modern factories, is now running at 30-40 percent capacity because of a lack of materials.
In Ba Ria-Vung Tau, the biggest seafood granary in the east of the northern region, a series of big corporations like East Wind Vietnam have only purchased 1/3 of the materials they purchased during the same period of last year. As a result, its processing line with the total capacity of 350 tonnes per day is now running at 20 percent capacity only.
Lack of materials and the economic downturn, according to VASEP, are the reasons that Vietnam’s seafood exports were low in the first five months of 2009, fulfilling only 30 percent of the yearly export plan ($4 billion).
Meanwhile, according to Nguyen Thi Thu Sac, Deputy Chairwoman of VASEP, the state still has not put forth any policy on assisting enterprises in the import of materials.
VietNamNet, LD
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