Increasing Demand for Sea Food in the World Market

The trend in the world for the last few decades was to move back to the natural products; organic products, hybrid cars, etc... And the sea food in most parts of the world could be identified as one of the most preferred choices of the people who prefer the natural products. There is a belief in most of them that the fish products give the best nourishment in all the meat products which we consume.

Especially in the main markets for Sri Lankan sea food industry the demand trend for the last decade or so was quite fascinating. Out of the three main markets namely; Europe, USA and Japan both the Europe and USA has shown a huge demand whilst Japan also has shown a very steady increase in the sea food consumption in the last few years.

The main competitive advantage of Sri Lanka for the entirety of the transport /export timeline was the quality which Sri Lanka is renowned for. When compared with the main competitors of Sri Lanka such as Indian’s, Thai’s and the Indonesian’s who mostly concentrate on the volume exports Sri Lanka holds the advantage of being the best quality supplier in the region. Due to that the increase in demand in those international markets which accounts for the majority of the total world sea food consumption gives a very positive signal for a bright future ahead for the sea food industry in Sri Lanka.

Especially it’s important for the country to have a long term vision for the development of the sea food business which has a similar potential as tourism. If I bring to you one good example the potential of it is, before the war erupted in Jaffna there were 3 factories who did the exporting and in the Tamilnadu area there were no sea food exporters. But with the war starting the Sri Lankan exporters had to close down those 3 factories whilst the Indians opened up 3 factories in the Tamilnadu area. Currently the joined income of those 3 factories amounts to more than 10 million US dollars per month. So for the last 20 years if that money came to Sri Lanka, the country should have earned more than 2,400 million US dollars which was a very huge sum which we lost due to the war.

Due to the fact that there would be a huge demand from those markets of the developed countries for ‘ready to eat sea food products’ which would outclass the traditional shelf bought cook, fried or battered sea food products. The country should seriously think of some way to take the maximum use of the existing competitive advantages to good use and develop a firm range of value added and branded products of some nature to meet the world demand in another 10 years time.