Coronavirus outbreak hits fishing hard

The latest fisheries forecast from the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, released today, warned the coronavirus will hit hard on Australia’s seafood production this financial year and is expected to fall by as much as 12 per cent to $2.8 billion in the wake of the outbreak.

The department has warned the COVID-19 outbreak is expected to have a higher impact than the 2003 SARS outbreak when Australia’s seafood exports to China accounted for only 3.0 per cent of the industry’s overseas earnings compared with 58 per cent last financial year.

The reason behind the coronavirus-fuelled fall, it said, was shrinking demand in China, now a high-revenue market for high-value commodities such as abalone and crayfish.

However, as the world starts to recover in the 2020-21 financial year, Australia’s seafood production is expected to bounce back to be worth around $3.4 billion as the world “returns to normal”.

The department said China was the destination for about 94 per cent of Australia's $752 million of rock lobster exports in 2018-19, and 42 per cent of Australia’s $194 million of abalone exports.

“The magnitude of the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak is uncertain and depends on the extent of the outbreak, its duration and the effectiveness of control measures,” Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resouce Economics and Sciences chief commodity analyst Peter Gooday said.

“Because of this, the effects of the outbreak could last beyond the 2019–20 financial year,” he said.

Rock lobsters hit record high prices on export markets in the 2015-16 financial year in the lead-up to Australia signing a free trade agreement with China.

Combined, salmonids – fish such as salmon and rainbow trout – and crayfish account for more than half the Australian fisheries’ production value.

However, the department has flagged that despite the loss of overseas markets, the traditional Christmas crayfish isn’t about to get any cheaper.

“Global lobster supply is expected to be constrained by limitations on the volume of wild-catch and relatively small global aquaculture production,” it said.

“This will tend to result in price increases in response to higher global demand because supply may not be able to proportionately respond to increased demand.”