After the pandemic: the global seafood trade market forecasts in 2030

The COVID-19 lockdowns have transitioned to a new normal and triggered commodity supply disruption and trade uncertainty, yet little is known about the seafood trade resilience of developing and developed countries amid pandemic-related shocks. Here, employing a newly developed geographical transition-net model, we simulate a set of idealized lockdown scenarios in a real-world seafood network. The results show that (1) even if restrictions from regions with high strictness policies were eventually lifted globally at the end of 2022, the pandemic-induced disruption will continue to affect global seafood trade until 2030, and the annual growth rate of the global seafood market would be around 1% lower than that during 2006–2019; (2) Due to the continued high level of stringency in China in 2022 and the soaring demand of seafood in the developed countries in the post-COVID-19 era, developed countries are increasingly reliant on their intra-regional trade until 2030; (3) The global seafood supply chains will magnify export losses beyond the direct effects of COVID-19, and there would be 17 to 57 million people in the developing countries in 2030 facing seafood supply shortage. The new long-term challenge is to call for the multilateral cooperation of major exporters for global seafood trade recovery. Our study provides a new perspective to evaluate the economic impact of COVID-19 as well as the cascading effect caused by the supply-chain linkages in the global seafood system.

Chunzhu Wei, Mo Zhang, Wei Chen, Yong Ge, Daoping Wang, Die Zhang, Desheng Xue, Qiuming Cheng, Changxiu Cheng, Wenguang Zhang