Fish Is Food - The FAO’s Fish Price Index

Abstract

World food prices hit an all-time high in February 2011 and are still almost two and a half times those of 2000. Although three billion people worldwide use seafood as a key source of animal protein, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations–which compiles prices for other major food categories–has not tracked seafood prices. We fill this gap by developing an index of global seafood prices that can help to understand food crises and may assist in averting them. The fish price index (FPI) relies on trade statistics because seafood is heavily traded internationally, exposing non-traded seafood to price competition from imports and exports. Easily updated trade data can thus proxy for domestic seafood prices that are difficult to observe in many regions and costly to update with global coverage. Calculations of the extent of price competition in different countries support the plausibility of reliance on trade data. Overall, the FPI shows less volatility and fewer price spikes than other food price indices including oils, cereals, and dairy. The FPI generally reflects seafood scarcity, but it can also be separated into indices by production technology, fish species, or region. Splitting FPI into capture fisheries and aquaculture suggests increased scarcity of capture fishery resources in recent years, but also growth in aquaculture that is keeping pace with demand. Regionally, seafood price volatility varies, and some prices are negatively correlated. These patterns hint that regional supply shocks are consequential for seafood prices in spite of the high degree of seafood tradability.

Income diversification and risk for fishermen

“…Technological change that increased technical efficiency over time may have both increased the need for consolidation and increased incentives to specialize, thereby driving decreases in diversification (48). Additionally, integration of global seafood markets may have tended to reduce asynchronous variation in prices (49), which would tend to weaken the risk reduction associated with diversification. Diversification could increase physical risk if it involves fishing in less-familiar areas or further from port.…”

Yield, flesh parameters, and proximate and fatty acid composition in muscle tissue of wild and cultured Vieja Colorada (Cichlasoma festae) in tropical Ecuadorian river

“…According to Tveterås et al (2012) it is estimated that about 3 billion people consume meat of fish and other marine organisms as the main source of protein.…”

Disentangling supply and demand shifts: the impacts on world salmon price

“…Tveterås et al (2012) notes that fish prices are less volatile than terrestrial food groups and do not appear to track any of the terrestrial food groups. Commodity-specific effects obviously play a major role in explaining the different price developments.…”

“…Fig. 1 shows FAO's (nominal) food price indices for meat, dairy, cereals, oils, sugar and fish, in addition to the salmon price index constructed by Tveterås et al (2012). Since the early 2000s, all these price categories began to increase to varying extents.…”