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Reason for lack of fish in Iran's domestic market explained

Business Materials 17 December 2018 10:33 (UTC +04:00)

Tehran, Iran, Dec.17

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The high volume of Iran fishery exports, has caused shortcomings in fish supply for domestic demands.

"What is certain is that over the past years it has been planned to increase the export of aquaculture; these programs have been operational and trout exports have been in place for the last three years, so meeting the needs of export markets that have been created over these 3 years should not be ignored", Director General of the Quality Improvement, Processing and Sea Food Market Development at Iran Fisheries Organization Issa Golshahi told Trend.

"The reason for drop of fish supply in domestic market is lack of commercial fish import, not the low production or high exports", he said.

"Part of it is due to exports programs but the first factor is more important than the second,” he said.

"Part of the processing units that use imported fish, couldn't import commercial fish due to various issues such as fluctuation in foreign currency rate and lack of allocation of official foreign currency. Therefore they turned to domestic fishes during their processing cycle", he added.

"For the first time this year, warm water fishes especially Silver carp, Common carp and Trout that are mostly supposed to be consumed fresh, were processed in the cycle, “he said.

Referring to status of importing items related to fish, such as fish feed, fingerling and trout eyed egg imports, he says that the official foreign currency rate (42,000 rials) was allocated for import of basic inputs like fingerling for fish farming.

Iran has the capacity to produce fish feed itself so the foreign currency rate for fish feed import has been provided by the Integrated System for Hard Currency Transactions (NIMA), with the rate of 85,000 rials per dollar.

Golshahi added that the official foreign currency rate is allocated to import Soybean meal which is among the necessary imported inputs.

Recently an Iranian official announced that the country has exported more than 137,000 tons of fishery products, valued at $507 million, since the start of the current Iranian year (started March 21, 2018).

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