Wed, Sep 16, 2015 page13

• Domestic demand drop drives Japanese fish exports

  • Bloomberg
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  The country that gave the world sushi now finds itself with too much fish.

  Demand for seafood has been dropping in Japan for much of the past decade as people eat more pork and beef, forcing domestic fishermen to look for buyers abroad.

  With the help of a plunging yen, that strategy is working. Exports are surging, and companies like Yamato Holdings Co and ANA Holdings Inc are expanding a delivery network across Asia, a region that still gets most of its sushi salmon from Norway, more than 8,000km away.

  Exports have been a godsend to Japan’s ￥1.4 trillion (US$11.7 billion) seafood industry, where the number of fishermen has shrunk 42 percent since 1995 and competition from cheaper imports has hurt profits.

  While domestic demand fell by more than 20 percent in the past decade, global consumption is rising as economic growth boosts incomes. Japanese seafood exports in the first half of this year are up by almost 30 percent.

  “We can offer fish we catch in the morning to buyers in the afternoon of the same day,” said Shigeru Koike, a 72-year-old fisherman in the port of Inatori, 150km southwest of Tokyo. “That’s our selling point. If we can catch more and our cooperative managers sell more fish to overseas, that will be great.”

  Foreign shipments by Japan reached 293,806 tonnes this year through June, up from 232,424 over the same period last year, reflecting improved demand for everything from scallops to the finest cuts of raw tuna eaten atop balled rice as sushi, according to data from the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

  A weakening of the yen has helped, making Japanese products cheaper for some importers. The currency is down 12 percent against the US dollar in the past year and has lost value relative to those of neighboring countries, including Taiwan, China and India.

  While Japan is still the second-biggest fish importer, purchases are surging in places like China, South Korea and Europe, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a report this year.

  Japan’s per capita consumption in the year through March last year declined to 27kg from a peak of 40.2kg a dozen years earlier, government data showed.

  Meat consumption exceeded fish for the first time in 2006, and Japan is now the world’s largest pork importer. While the FAO estimates Japan still bought US$15.3 billion of fish from foreign suppliers in 2013, that figure was down from US$18 billion a year earlier.

  Global fish consumption climbed to 19kg per person in 2012 from 9.9kg in the 1960s, according to the FAO, while the World Bank projects food-fish demand will rise to 137.7 million tonnes by 2030 from 101.3 million tonnes in 2006.

  In China, per capita consumption expanded 6 percent annually from 1990 to 2010 to 35.1kg, FAO data showed.

  To tap that demand, Yamato, Japan’s largest express delivery company, uses refrigerated trucks to transport fish from ports to local airports, then on to a hub in Okinawa Prefecture. Within four hours by air are 2 billion possible consumers, including in Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

  Yamato began door-to-door delivery of chilled fresh food overseas in October 2013 and has expanded the service from Hong Kong to Taiwan in March and Singapore last month.

  All Nippon Airways is adding more cargo flights in the region to meet demand.

  Emerging economies are buying more high-value fish species like salmon and tuna, FAO data showed. Salmon accounts for 14 percent of fishery trade and is the most popular sushi topping among Asian consumers outside Japan.
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