Turkey‘s Foreign Trade Trends of Sea Food

Abstract

The total seafood production of is in a slight decreasing trend. The main factor causing this trend is fisheries. In contrast, aquaculture production is in a rapid increase trend. With 1/5 of the total production are exported, volume, quantity and value of the seafood product export is rapidly increasing. Contrary to the development in agriculture, in parallel with the rapid increase in exports, an increase surplus in trade balance of seafood available. The total amount of the surplus reached 610 million $ in 2016. Aquaculture production is the main source of the seafood exports. Sea bass (%24), sea bream (%21) and trout (%13) are the main species of seafood export. EU countries is the leading export market with a share of 65%, and fallowed by Japan (6.6%), Russia (5.9%), Lebanon (3.9%) and USA (3.5%). The main challenges of Turkey in external markets is the deficiencies in sales and operation in accordance with international norms. Thus, about 55% of the exports were fresh or chilled fish products, while fish fillets (25%) and processed frozen fish (9%) had smaller shares. In addition, especially the negative influence of increasing feed prices in recent years had adverse impacts on fisheries stocks and therefore the foreign trade. As of 2015, about half of the anchovy with a 49% share in total production and almost all of the sprat fishes were used for fish flour and oil, thus the breeding of herbivore and omnivore species has been on the agenda. Present study has been prepared in accordance to the statistical evaluations of secondary data obtained from literature sources and results of the studies focused on the topic. Within this context, aim of the study was to evaluate the developments in seafood production and foreign trade, discuss both on the challenges encountered in foreign trade and on the solutions to these problems.