TRADE-BRAZIL: Fishing Industry Exports Growing Fast

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 14 2002 (IPS) - Although Brazil is still far from becoming a major exporter of seafood, it could come close to achieving that goal within the next few years if the fishing industry continues to grow as it has in the past three years.

Brazil’s seafood exports more than doubled from 120.4 million dollars in 1998 to 283.5 million last year. At the same time, imports, hurt by the January 1999 collapse of the local currency, the real, fell from 453.4 million to 260.9 million dollars in the same period.

The industry thus chalked up a small surplus of 22.6 million dollars in 2001, after more than a decade of negative trade balances.

But the industry’s share of the global market for seafood, estimated at 60 billion dollars a year, is still small, the Ministry of Agriculture’s Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture (DPA) noted.

The target is to expand exports to a total of one billion dollars by 2005, which would require a twofold rise in sales every two years. The possibilities for growth are based on aquaculture, especially shrimp farming, and tuna fishing.

Last year, Brazil successfully pressed the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) to expand this country’s quota of tuna and related species from 40,000 to 100,000 tons a year in the south Atlantic.

In order to increase its catch, this country of 162 million, which has no strong tradition of deep sea fishing, will have to expand its fleet of seagoing vessels from the current 84 to at least 250. Half of today’s fleet is leased, at a cost equivalent to around one-third of production costs, which reduces the industry’s net revenues.

But it is aquaculture that is making Brazil an increasingly big supplier for the world seafood market.

An abundance of bodies of fresh water, added to the country’s extensive coastline, provide virtually unlimited conditions for fish and shrimp farming, at a time when fish stocks in the oceans are being depleted, and the fishing industry is facing increasingly stiff environmental restrictions.

A total of 5.3 million hectares are covered by fresh water in Brazil, 90 percent of which is a public resource. The development of aquaculture on just one percent of that total area would make it possible to produce 12 million tons a year of farmed shrimp, DPA director Gabriel Calzavara estimated.

That would make Brazil the world’s second-biggest producer of farmed seafood, surpassed only by China, he observed.

Shrimp dominates aquaculture in Brazil, accounting for 45.5 percent of Brazilian seafood sales last year, or 129 million dollars in revenues, Antonio Elias, the head of the DPA statistics department, told IPS. That total was five times the 1998 total.

The Brazilian Association of Shrimp Farmers hopes to boost export revenues to 200 million dollars this year.

Aquaculture production is thus growing at a rate of around 30 percent a year, said Elias. In the past few years, Brazil’s shrimp production has been fuelled by rising prices, the result of a drop in supplies from major Pacific rim exporters affected by a disease that has hurt production in countries like Ecuador and Indonesia.

Favourable climatic conditions and abundant natural resources have also enabled Brazil to achieve high levels of productivity in shrimp farming, with yields averaging four tons per hectare, and as high as seven tons in some cases, according to the National Bank of Economic and Social Development, which finances shrimp farmers.

Thailand, the world’s leading producer of shrimp, has an average yield of 1.25 tons per hectare.

Another promising aquaculture product in Brazil is the tilapia, a species of fresh water fish native to Egypt, which is not only a hardy fish, but has a tasty flavor and provides high productivity levels.

“We have the potential to produce 10 million tons a year” of tilapia, said Elias, who noted, however, that reaching that target would require the creation of an external market, because in Brazil, fish has a hard time competing with chicken, which is a much less expensive source of protein.

Furthermore, Brazilians are not yet familiar with the tilapia, which has to compete with species that have already carved out a market niche. That means demand for the new species has to be generated, in order to ensure a regular flow of sales until large- scale production is achieved, which will bring down costs.

But in northeastern Brazil, tilapia is already being farmed for export, said Elias.

The development of aquaculture and fishing in Brazil has also benefited by an administrative decision which transferred policy- making on the fishing industry from the Environment Ministry to the DPA, which answers to the Agriculture Ministry, in 1998.

Calzavara pointed out that the Environment Ministry’s main task is protecting the environment, not ensuring the development of the fishing industry.

The chief obstacles to fostering the development of aquaculture in Brazil, as identified by the DPA, are scarce availability of credit for fish farmers, the high cost of feeding breeding populations of shrimp and fish, insufficient research, and deficits in transport and industrialisation.