Oil spill affects various seafood sectors

The worst oil spill in the US gulf affected many seafood sectors.

For shrimp supplying chain, it forces them to shift to other market. Usually US comsumers use 1.2 billion poundbs of warm water shrimp, mostly imported form Indonesia, India, Thailand... and about 200 million pounds of Gulf shrimp. Due to the oil spill the quantity of gulf shrimp shrinks and important distributors in the US such as Perfomance Food Group, Sysco, US Food Services... have to look to other sources for filling the shortage. This is one of the reason to push black tiger price high (it is said the price in VN is at its 10 year high, while due to some disease, shrimp quantity supplied by Indonesia, the No. 2 supplier in 2009, has been down seriously and evidently contributed to high price in the market for Black Tiger.)

For the oyster, the biggest seafood restaurant system in the US, Res Lobster, has announced recently that they had to remove oyster from its 435 restaurant menus (Red Lobster has about 660 restaurants throughout the US, but not all these restaurants serve oyster). Dardent, the owner of Red Lobster restaurant system said that this is resulted from the closure of their supplying oyster processing factory, the American Pure Processing Co, due to shortage of oyster caused by oil spill and also by fewer fishing boats.

We can also see that the Japanese favorite fish, the blue tuna that has been sourced mainly in the Gulf of Mexico (of Thunnus thynus species) source changes too. Due to oil spill they switch to buying southern blue tuna (Thunnus maccoyi) from south of Australia. However this cannot bring to a big change for Australia tuna in Japan market because recently Australia decided to reduce in tuna quota to 23.7%, or 4,015 metric tons. This can stimlate the tuna farming project in Spain to gain its speed to become the biggest tuna farm in the world (Futuna Blue Espana Farm).