July 7, 2009

The Vietnamese government is planning to ban the import of fish from Norway, Chile, China and Canada in July to review production at these sources as it did last year with Vietnamese fish.

 

Duong Ngoc Minh, head of the Russian Market Seafood Management Board said that the Russian market would then need far more Vietnamese pangasius.

 

Officials said the opening of several markets, especially Russia, means that experts may have been wrong when they said pangasius exports would decline on shrinking international demand.

 

Duong said the outlook for pangasius, or Vietnamese tra fish, should not be nearly as pessimistic as expectations voiced earlier this year.

 

He said the Russian market has been consuming more Vietnamese fish and needed nearly 10 times more than its 7,500 tonnes of fish imports from Vietnam so far this year.

 

He said exporting to Russia brought higher profit ratios than the European and US markets, but Moscow's requirements were in fact less strict.

 

So far this year, Vietnamese exports were fourfold higher to Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia and Lithuania, tenfold to Argentina and nearly twofold to Mexico year-on-year, said the association.

 

Shipments to markets like the EU and US remained similar to numbers from the first half last year.

 

Duong said the country had exported US$1.2 billion to US$1.3 billion worth of pangasius in 2009, compared to the US$1 billion forecast by the association early this year. He forecast pangasius exports would increase through the end of the year.

 

Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development deputy minister Luong Le Phuong said increases could help ease the minds of farmers who were worried about hiking feed costs.

 

Phuong said the government has singled out pangasius as the country's key seafood product and provided assistance to local farmers and processors.

 

He also said the ministry has been helping farmers implement microbe technology to treat water in farming pools as a way to improve export quality.

 

Vietnam exported US$477 million pangasius in the first five months, 4-percent less than the same period last year.

 

The total accounted for 35 percent of the country's US$1.4 billion in export revenues during the period.