Seafood and Aquaculture Marketing Handbook

Carole R. Engle, Kwamena K. Quagrainie, Madan M. Dey

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118859278
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Fisheries & Aquaculture
• Index: Technology & Engineering

SEAFOOD AND AQUACULTURE MARKETING HANDBOOK

Aquaculture, the farming of aquatic animals and plants, and other seafood business continue to grow rapidly around the world. However, many of these businesses fail due to the lack of sufficient attention to marketing. The Seafood and Aquaculture Marketing Handbook provides the reader with a comprehensive yet user-friendly presentation of key concepts and tools necessary for aquaculture and seafood businesses to evaluate and adapt to changing market conditions.

Markets for aquaculture and seafood products are diverse, dynamic, and complex. The Seafood and Aquaculture Marketing Handbook presents fundamental principles of marketing with specific discussion of aquaculture and seafood market channels and supply chains from around the world, and builds towards a step-by-step approach to strategic market planning for successful aquaculture and seafood businesses.

This book is an essential reference for all aquaculture seafood business as well as students of aquaculture. The volume contains a series of synopses of specific markets, an extensive annotated bibliography, and webliography for additional sources of information.

Written by authors with vast experience in international marketing for aquaculture and seafood products, this volume is a valuable source of guidance for those seeking to identify profitable markets for their aquaculture and seafood products.

Chapter 1
Seafood and aquaculture markets

This introductory chapter will provide an overview of seafood and aquaculture markets worldwide, the global supply of major seafood and aquaculture species, the location of major markets, and international trade volumes and partners. The chapter continues with a discussion of characteristics of aquaculture products and the market competition between wild-caught and farmed fish. The chapter concludes by summarizing trends in consumption of seafood and aquaculture products. Practical examples from aquaculture are included throughout.

Global trends in seafood and aquaculture markets

Successful industries must be successful in marketing their products yet marketing is not well understood by many aquaculturists. This book both defines and explains many key marketing concepts and components of theory fundamental to a thorough understanding of marketing that is necessary for aquaculture businesses to successfully develop effective marketing plans and strategies. A market can be defined in a number of ways. It can be a location, such as the Fulton Fish Market in New York City or the Tsukiji Market in Tokyo, Japan, a product such as the jumbo shrimp market, a time such as the Lenten season market in the United States or the European Christmas market, or a level such as the retail or wholesale market.

This chapter will focus mostly on geographic markets but will touch on several other levels of markets. Chapter 3 presents more specific information on fundamental marketing terms and concepts.

A frieze in an Egyptian tomb dated to 2500 B.C. shows the harvest of cultured tilapia (Bardach et al. 1972). While this date places aquaculture as an ancient technology, it is still quite young when compared to terrestrial agriculture. Diamond (1999) shows that domesticated species of both crops and animals were being cultivated by 8500 B.C. (Table 1.1). Southwest Asia and China served as the birthplace for many types of terrestrial agriculture and aquatic crops. Diamond theorized that areas with sparse game would provide greater returns to the effort in developing farming technologies. For most species of fish, scarcities due to overfishing have become evident only in the latter part of the 1900s. Thus, strong incentives to explore and invest in widespread domesticated production of aquatic plants and animals have been of comparatively recent origin. The ensuing level of scientific and technological development of aquaculture in the 1900s has resulted in a dramatic blossoming of aquaculture industries.

Table 1.1 Dates of domestication of various plant and animal crops important in the cultural development of humans.

Source: Diamond (1999).

Area	Domesticated		Earliest attested date of domestication
	Plants	Animals
Independent origins of domestication
Southwest Asia	Wheat, pea, olive	Sheep, goat	8500 B.C.
China	Rice, millet	Pig, silkworm	By 7500 B.C.
Mesoamerica	Corn, beans, squash	Turkey	By 3500 B.C.
Andes and Amazonia	Potato, manioc	Llama, guinea pig	By 3500 B.C.
Eastern U.S.	Sunflower, goosefoot	None	2500 B.C.
Sahel	Sorghum, African rice	Guinea fowl	By 5000 B.C.
Tropical West Africa	African yams, oil palm	None	By 3000 B.C.
Ethiopia	Coffee, tea	None	Unknown
New Guinea	Sugar cane, banana	None	7000 B.C.
Local demonstration following arrival of founder crops from elsewhere
Western Europe	Poppy, oat	None	6000–3500 B.C.
Indus Valley	Sesame, eggplant	Humped cattle	7000 B.C.
Egypt	Sycamore fig, chufa	Donkey, cat	6000 B.C.

Continued growth in the global economy and in the world’s population has resulted in increasing demand for seafood. However, the volume of seafood supplied from capture fisheries across the world has leveled off since about 1994, while the quantity of aquaculture production supplied worldwide has continued to increase (Fig. 1.1). The global supply from capture fisheries increased most rapidly during the late 1950s through the end of the 1960s. From that point, capture fisheries continued to increase, but at a slower rate, reaching slightly more than 95 million metric tons in 1996. Since then, world capture fisheries have fluctuated from 86.8 million to 94.8 million metric tons, averaging about 92 million metric tons. It is clear that most of the increase in the world supply of fish and seafood has been due to the expansion of aquaculture production.

Fig. 1.1 Volume of wild-caught and farmed supply of seafood, 1950–2012.

Source: FAO (2014).

Global aquaculture production has increased more than 40-fold, from 2 million metric tons in 1960 to 90.4 million metric tons in 2012 (FAO 2014), while chicken meat production increased by a factor of 10 and beef production doubled (Thornton 2010). From 2008 to 2012, the annual growth rate of cultured finfish and shellfish production averaged 4%. Capture fisheries production has declined by 3% from 1996 to 2012.

All aquatic farming combined represented a 3% share of the world harvest of fish, shellfish, and seaweeds in 1950 (FAO 2014). By 2012, this share had increased to 49.4% and consisted of a record 90.4 million metric tons of total farmed aquatic production. Of this, the greatest increase was for freshwater diadromous fishes (41.97 million metric tons), aquatic plants (23.78 million metric tons), and mollusks (15.17 million metric tons). The total value of aquaculture production worldwide increased to $144.3 billion in 2012.

The relative costs of capture fisheries have increased over time while those of aquaculture production have decreased. In the United States, the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act established a 200 nautical mile (370 km) Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) for commercial fisheries. The U.S. Magnuson Act, combined with declining abundance of many types of fish stocks, requires trawlers to travel greater distances to find supplies of fish. In other parts of the world, countries such as Chile, Ecuador, and Peru have also claimed rights to 200 nautical mile zones for fishing. However, a few countries, such as Papua New Guinea and Anguil...