Marketing
55
Blockages causing limited exports of Asian shrimp to high-end HOSO shrimp markets Why do Latin American HOSO shrimp often have better reputation than those from Asia? By Hervé Lucien Brun
Asia is by far the leading producer of farmed shrimp. We can find Asian origin shrimp in all consumer countries (Figure 1). Nevertheless, they are still shrimp that can be qualified as a commodity, defined as widely available products with little difference in their added value, from one supplier to another. However, in the most demanding markets in terms of quality, especially for the head on shell on (HOSO) product, such as in cooking markets in France and Spain and also in China, most of the imported shrimp are from Latin America, mainly from Ecuador (Figure 2). These markets often represent more than a third of global shrimp imports (Figure 3). The aim of this article is to explain why Latin American HOSO shrimp often have the reputation of better quality than those from Asia.
The HOSO shrimp market
Initially, the most important shrimp market was the US logistical, which imported mainly headless shell on (HLSO) blocks. At that time, in most Asian countries, farmed shrimp were sold to middlemen who brought them to the big city markets to auction to processors. However, currently in Europe and Asia, there is a high demand for HOSO shrimp, making it a higher value product. Today, to obtain better quality shrimp from their Asian suppliers, the Chinese importers give a better price for the "live frozen" head on shrimp. There is no easy nor cheap technique to achieve good quality head on shrimp. However, since shrimp heads degrade immediately with death until frozen, bringing live shrimp to the factory will drastically reduce the degradation process.
Therefore, why is there this situation in Asia where quality HOSO shrimp is so difficult to achieve in farms and processing plants and so little product end up in the highend HOSO shrimp markets? Analysing the situation, the reasons could be because of the following factors: • History and culture • Structural differences in the aquaculture sector • Technical and logistical differences
History and culture
Europeans began to be interested in farmed shrimp in the second half of the 1980s. With the linguistic and historical proximity between Spain and Latin America, Spanish buyers, the biggest European consumers, turned first to Latin American producers who produce white shrimp which are favoured in their market. Latin American processors marketed 2kg boxes in semiIQF blocks that were sold in supermarkets. Later, the French buyers followed them. But in this case, it is for the cooking industry (called "cookers") in consumption areas where frozen shrimp are cooked and sold refrigerated to customers. Importers have higher quality requirements so that the cooked shrimp will not suffer any damage or loss of quality. In the 1990s, Ecuador was the first supplier of farmed shrimp to Spain and France. Ecuador also established close relationships with these European countries, such that an important Ecuadorian group became the main shareholder of a French cooker.
November/December 2021 AQUA Culture Asia Pacific
