China’s Aquatic Products Supply and Demand Situation over the Past Decade

Abstract

This paper reviews the production, consumption and trade trends of aquatic products over the past decade. Both the aquatic products demands for direct consumption and processing were increased significantly, which promoted aquatic products industry development. Although the outputs of aquatic products were kept increasing, the speed were lower, especially the outputs of natural grown aquatic products grew very slowly. Both the imports and exports of aquatic products increased a lot, while the growth rate of export was faster than that of import, as a result, trade surplus became larger. About one third of domestic production was used as direct human consumption. The processing of aquatic products increased rapidly and also accounted for about one third of total production. Both of the direct human consumption and processing consumption increased faster than the output of aquatic products over the same period. The gaps between supply and demand of aquatic products kept growing, which lead to the price of aquatic products rising. In the future, the production structure of aquatic products should be optimized and the quality should be improved to satisfy the diversity and growing demand.

This work was supported by the National Twelfth-Five Year Research Program of China (Grant No. 2012BAH20B04).