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Seafood exports take a serious hit
Vietnam is losing Middle Eastern and North African markets, reports the business paper Saigon Tiep Thi, due to a media campaign that condemns Vietnam’s “tra” fish as unsafe.
The media in the Middle East and North Africa has posted articles providing unsubstantiated information about Vietnam’s tra fish (catfish) industry.
The Middle East and North Africa have emerged as growth markets for Vietnamese exporters during the last three years. Seafood exports to these areas, especially frozen tra fish, have grown considerably year after year.
Now, Vietnam has been accused of farming the fish in water that is polluted with high levels of antibiotic residue which can cause cancer.
As the result of these media campaigns, the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) reports that Vietnam’s market share in these areas has dramatically decreased.
In 2008, the two markets imported approximately 76,000 tons of frozen tra fillets from Vietnam, worth $193.3 million, or 13.3 percent of the total export value of Vietnam’s tra fish. The figure represents an increase in export volume of three times and 2.67 times over the export value of 2007.
Exports to Egypt in 2008 grew four-fold in comparison with 2007 and 10 times over 2006, while the exports to Saudi Arabia increased by 119 times in terms of export volume, from 93 tons in 2007 to 11,100 tons in 2008.
Vietnam’s exports to other markets also recorded impressive growth rates during the last three years. Exports to the UAE grew by 11 percent in export volume, those to Jordan expanded 3.1 times and others to Morocco rose 3.3 times.
The three key markets (Egypt, UAE and Saudi Arabia) alone consumed 66 percent of Vietnam’s total export volume and 60.5 percent of the total value of exports to the region.
However, the tra fish exports to the Middle East and North Africa have dropped sharply since April 2009. Tra exports to Egypt fell by 50.1 percent in May, 65.3 in June and 42.2 percent in July, compared with the same periods in 2008. Overall exports for the first seven and one-half months to Egypt were only 54 percent of the volume for the same period of 2008.
The same thing has occurred in the Saudi Arabian and UAE markets.
The situation is reminiscent of the shock Vietnamese fish exporters experienced in 2003 and 2004, when they faced anti-dumping lawsuits by U.S. catfish and shrimp producers. The U.S. imposed trade controls on ‘catfish’ imports from Vietnam.
VASEP said that in order to protect the tra fish production and protect the image of tra fish, providing accurate information about the process of tra production should be a top priority. The world’s consumers, VASEP asserts, need to have the hard facts about tra fish.
vietnamnet, sgtt
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