Vietnam’s shrimp swims to the bottom like a stone

Aug 9th at 12:34

09-08-2012 12:34:28+07:00

After catfish, it’s now the brackish shrimp in Mekong Delta which is facing big difficulties.

The epidemics have killed shrimp in masses, while no cure has been found. The stricken shrimp hatchery area has increased every day. Meanwhile, the shrimp prices have dropped dramatically, though they are considered too expensive in the eyes of domestic seafood processors.

It’s now the right time for shrimp farmers to reconsider whether their hatchery can bring profits amid the serious epidemics, increasingly high input costs and decreasing low sale prices.

Epidemics bring heavy losses

According to the Cultivation Department under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) the southern coastal provinces have repeatedly reported big loss for brackish shrimp crops.

In 2011 alone, Mekong Delta provinces reported the damage on 80,000 hectares of shrimp hatchery areas with the toll of up to 5 trillion dong.

Soc Trang reported the biggest loss with 26,000 hectares of fields stricken by the epidemics. Nguyen Van Khoi, Deputy Director of the Soc Trang provincial Department for Agriculture and Rural Development, said MARD sent its staff to the site to survey the site. Leading experts in the world also came there and discovered the disease of shrimp, but there has been no specific remedy for the disease.

“The experts just advised us to keep shrimp in a clean environment,” he said.

In 2011, the Bac Lieu provincial authorities propped up 20 billion dong to farmers to help them buy feed for shrimp and breeders. The sum of money may be up to 29 billion dong. In the first eight months of the year alone, more than 10,000 hectares of shrimp farmed in industrial and semi-industrial way suffered from epidemics

Luong Ngoc Lan, Director of the Bac Lieu provincial agriculture department, besides the familiar diseases, shrimp have recently suffered from new diseases, thus causing big losses to farmers.

According to Dr Nguyen Van Hao, Head of the Aquatic Research Institute No. 2, farmers might have overused medicine, and the toxic substance residues still exist in the mud layer at the bottom of the ponds, thus causing a lot of diseases.

Hao said that the living environment for the shrimp has become no longer clean.

Vietnam’s shrimp too expensive?

Black tiger shrimp and white leg shrimp prices have been decreasing dramatically.

A kilo of black tiger shrimp (20 shrimp per kilo) is now traded at 190,000 dong, while smaller shrimp (30 or 40 shrimp per kilo) are selling at 107,000-115,000 dong per kilo. The prices represent a 30 percent decrease from early this year and 40 percent decrease from the peak price level.

Meanwhile, the input costs, including the shrimp feed, chemicals to treat water, have increased by 30 percent over 2011. Vo Hong Ngoan, a farmer in Mekong Delta, said the production cost has climbed to 90,000-110,000 dong per kilo, and if selling shrimp at 115,000 dong, farmers would incur loss.

Meanwhile, domestic seafood processors have refused to buy shrimp from domestic sources, saying that the shrimp are too expensive. Therefore, analysts have predicted that the current low shrimp prices would drop further in the time to come.

According to the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers VASEP, the shrimp prices in Bac Lieu, Ca Mau and Soc Trang province are now higher by 15-30 percent (one dollar per kilo) than the shrimp prices in Thailand, India or China.

VASEP has said that the high prices have forced domestic processors to refuse to buy Vietnam’s shrimp. If their products are expensive, they would not be able to compete with the products from other countries in the world.