Mekong Delta farmers are now harvesting a poor shrimp crop, posing a serious shortage of shrimps to local export seafood processing plants which are now also in crucial need of tra and basa catfish supplies, according to the Ministry of Fisheries.
“The 2006 shrimp culture crop has not been as successful as expected as shrimp are dying en masse in the Mekong River Delta and in the southern aquaculture areas as well,” said an official from the ministry.
The Fisheries Service of Tra Vinh province reported that the province had witnessed mass deaths of more than 70 million shrimp so far.
Meanwhile, Ca Mau province has reported 20-80 per cent losses in its hundreds of thousands of hectares of shrimp breeding area. Kien Giang has also reported severe losses of 20-80 per cent in some areas.
Thin supply of shrimp has pushed its prices sky high in the region. Prices of shrimp have skyrocketed to VND160,000 (US$10) per kilo.
The lack of material is forecast to last until mid May or June, when the southern area is due to harvest a new crop.
The shrimp deaths have made seafood processors worry about how to fulfill export orders. Some of them are worried that the shortage will last longer than predicted. Thousands of farmers cannot pay debts to banks as they may face a dead loss for the 2006 crop.
Tra and basa prices have also skyrocketed recently to VND13,000 and VND15,000 per kilo, respectively, due to insufficient materials.
Meanwhile, farmers do not want to make transactions at present in order to wait for the prices to go up further. As a result, processing plants are running at just 50 per cent of their designed capacity
According to the An Nhon Fisheries Association in Dong Thap province, fish volume is small, while fish breeders do not want to sell product at this moment.
The output of tra in some provincial communes is down by 30 per cent compared to 2005 as many farmers have decided to give up farming.
In the past, when the tra and basa supply was abundant, the material prices went down sharply, leading to overproduction.
As experts have said before, overproduction is followed by underproduction as some farmers give up fish breeding. If farmers and processors cannot find a suitable way of cooperating, the imbalance between material supply and demand will continue to be repeated.
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