In January 2020, the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and a pandemic in March 2020 (COVID-19 pandemic). In response to it, many governments imposed a temporal cessation on large parts of their economies to reduce the propagation of the virus. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted worldwide supply chains due to export restrictions and limited freight shipping causing negative effects in many economic sectors with increases in production and transportation costs or decreases in demand and prices of consuming products. Recent surveys suggest that this threat has jeopardized the aquaculture industry throughout the world, having a very negative impact on the profit of the European firms. How the EU aquaculture industry has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and which countries have had a better evolution are important questions to analyze.
Within the EU, aquaculture is considered as a key economic activity with a large potential to improve income and employment in coastal and rural areas. Thus, the EU aquaculture provides about one fifth of the EU’s domestic seafood supply and has around 15,000 aquaculture enterprises with almost 70,000 employees. In 2018, for example, the sector produced almost 1.2 million tons and was valued at €4.1 billion, being the EU aquaculture production, in volume and value, concentrated in four countries: Spain, France, Italy, and Greece.
A wide representative sample of 879 marine aquaculture firms from the four countries with the largest production in the EU: Greece (127 firms), France (129 firms), Italy (440 firms) and Spain (183 firms) were selected in the BVD’s Orbis database for our research. We have employed averaged economic data of these firms for two different periods: the pre-COVID period (2016-2019) and the post-COVID period (2020-2023).
Our results are presented in Tables 1, 2, 3 and 4. According to these results, we can observe that after the COVID-19 pandemic the economic evolution of the EU marine aquaculture has been different in the main production countries, having the best results on average the Greek firms.