Sector’s emphasis on spot sales of fresh product adds to industry cyclicality

A particular characteristic of the bass and bream sector is that the market is mostly fresh-based with large price swings. It also suffers from limited value-addition and product development. The reason for the latter is partly in the biological nature of the species with a growth cycle and size that hardly lends itself to production of portion size fillets. However, the cyclicality experienced by the sector has an additional different cause, namely the fragmentation of the industry both at the national and the international level. Lack of industry cooperation and sharing of information make reliable estimates for biomass and production forecasts difficult, not only for outsiders, analysts and banks, but most importantly for the producers themselves. Read report at FAO Globefish.