November 25, 2010

Vietnam faces raw shrimp shortage as China boosts imports

Vietnamese seafood processing plants have been in serious shortage of raw shrimp after Chinese traders rushed to buy the material, a VASEP official said Tuesday (Nov 23).

"Chinese traders are appearing everywhere in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam to hunt for shrimp to bring into their mainland," said Ho Quoc Luc, head of the VASEP's Shrimp Department.

These foreign traders buy almost kinds of shrimp, both small and large, both prawn and white-led, Luc said, adding that they pay higher prices for the raw material than Vietnamese firms.

In Ca Mau province, the largest shrimp breeding area in Vietnam, Chinese traders were estimated to have bought tens of thousand tonnes of shrimp, out of a total 100,000 tonnes harvested in the province.

Vietnamese companies, meanwhile, had to scale down processing capacity of their plants for shrimp shortage despite the fact that domestic shrimp output has increased in recent years. Most of plants in the region are running at only 50%-60% of their designed capacity, the official said.

Vietnamese authorities as well as traders, however, have not yet made any solution to this issue. Shrimp is the largest export staple of Vietnam's seafood industry.

Vietnam earned US$1.4 billion from exporting 167,170 tonnes of shrimps between January and September, rising by 22.13% in value and 14.2% in volume from a year earlier.